"Information Asymmetry as a Reason for Vertical Integration." In the Proceedings of the NE-165 Conference titled Strategy and Policy in the Food System: Emerging Issues, Washington, D.C., June 20-21, 1996

A closed-form dual representation of the multi-output production problem is developed under CARA and the large exponential family of multivariate price distributions. System-wide response analysis allows an understanding of second moment and risk tolerance effects, and provides insights on...

The feeder animal price is a derivative in the sense that its value depends upon the price of animals for the consumption market. It also depends upon the biological growth technology and feed costs. Daily maintenance costs are of particular interest to the husbander because they can be avoided...

Three trends that have been subject to recent discussion are a movement away from undifferentiated agricultural commodities toward more specialized products, reduced reliance on open markets for raw agricultural products, and a movement toward agricultural industrialization. Recent research...

Monotonicity of the likelihood ratio for conditioned densities is a common technical assumption in economic models. But we have found no empirical tests for its plausibility. This paper develops such a test based on the theory of order-restricted inference, which is robust with respect to the...

In this paper I focus on how grade prices affect the provision of product transformation skills in the food marketing system. A self-protection model is used to show how resources are allocated to protect the potential value of commodities in the marketing channel. Resource allocations may be...

The spatial dimension of agricultural production is important when a communicable disease enters a region. This paper considers two sorts of biosecurity risk that producers can seek to protect against. One concerns the risk of  spread: that neighboring producers do not take due care in...

The use of plausible stochastic price processes in price risk analysis has allowed advances not seen in crop yield risk analysis. This study develops a stochastic process for yield modeling and risk management. The Pólya urn process is an internally consistent dynamic representation of yield...

While controversy surrounds skewness attributes of typical yield distributions, a better understanding is important for agricultural policy assessment and for crop-insurance rate setting. Day (1965) conjectured that crop yield skewness declines with an increase in nitrogen use at low levels but...

Taking location as given, we study imperfect competition on a circular city. In Bertrand oligopoly, we identify price harmonics as a function of firm unit costs and locations. The sum of oligopoly profits is larger when costs and/or locations are more dispersed in the...