We study incentives for information sharing among agricultural intermediaries in imperfectly competitive markets for farm output. Information sharing always increases expected grower and total surplus, but may reduce expected intermediary profits. Even when expected profits increase with...

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....

Cooperative owners have a transactional relationship - as customers or input suppliers - with their firm in addition to their investment relationship. This changes both the incentives and the information that owners have to monitor managerial performance. We argue that this difference reduces...