This paper uses extensive data on production outcomes for processing tomato growers in California to examine the efficacy of explicit incentives observed in grower-processor contracts. Our data include all deliveries of tomatoes to some 51 processors over a period of 7 years in which at least 65...

We study business organization and coordination of specialty-market hog production using a comparative analysis of two Iowa pork niche-marketing firms. We describe and analyze each firm's management of five key organizational challenges: planning and logistics, quality assurance, process...

We develop a financial-contracting theory of the cooperative firm where production requires three generic tasks: working, managing, and monitoring. Workers provide an intermediate input (or labor directly); managers convert the workers' input into a final output; and directors monitor managers....