This paper contends that there is an important distinction between governance structure and contractual form, and that organizational boundaries, defined by governance structures, need not explain contractual form. The basic idea is that governance refers to the general environments and...

This paper examines technical efficiency of more separated ownership and control (SOC) grain and oilseed farms relative to combined ownership and control (COC) in the U.S. Theory has provided specific benefits to why SOC firms can be more efficient, thus more likely to survive, despite SOC being...

Teaching economics has been shown to encourage students to defect in a prisoner's dilemma game. However, can ethics training reverse that effect and promote cooperation? We conducted an experiment to answer this question. We found that students who had the ethics module had higher rates of...

Voting on unidimensional issues will produce equilibrium outcomes if voter preferences are single peaked. While the equilibrium outcomes would not necessarily be Pareto optimal, they would be stable. This paper shows that voting on multidimensional issues can produce stable equilibria if the...

This paper distinguishes between two types of ethical problems. A Type I ethical problem is one in which there is no consensus as to what is ethical. A Type II ethical problem is one in which there is a consensus as to what is ethical, but incentives exist for individuals to behave unethically....

Cognitive biases play an important role in creating and perpetuating problems that lead to foodborne illness outbreaks. By using insights from behavioral ethics, we argue that sometimes people engage in unethical behavior that increases the likelihood of foodborne illness outbreaks without...

We consider the implications of trends in the number of U.S. farmers and food imports on the question of what role U.S. farmers have in an increasingly global agrifood system. Our discussion stems from the argument some scholars have made that American consumers can import their food more...

The purposes of this paper are to examine how public trust affects public support for biotechnology and genetically modified (GM) foods and to assess how an understanding of the determinants of public trust impact post-market surveillance of GM foods. To this end, a model of trust is developed...

According to empirical evidence, extrinsic incentives often crowd out intrinsic motivation, thus reducing the effort choices of workers. This article presents a simple model illustrating how the introduction of monetary incentives causes a discontinuous reduction in worker effort as well as a...

We examine how organizational characteristics of producer-owned firms affect the level of perceived trust among cooperative members, using survey data from a sample of U.S. agricultural cooperatives. Our results indicate trust is correlated with property right and organizational structures...