This article examines motivations underlying the government's choice of alternative policy mechanisms for subsidizing agriculture. Optimal policies are analyzed for three government objectives: one where the government wishes to ensure a minimum level of net income for all farmers, a second...

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....

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 use historical variation in the market share of agricultural cooperatives to examine the nature of the cooperative firm. Our data include the share of sectoral output accounted for by cooperative firms across 15 commodity sectors during the period 1930-2002. We test a simple financial...

The declining share of beef in total U.S. meat consumption has motivated industry-wide efforts to improve average beef quality through more effective coordination among the various market participants. Increased use of explicit "grid" pricing mechanisms over the last decade represent initial...

We examine agricultural contracting parties' incentives to employ quality measurement. Quality measurement will be used if on-farm production of ``quality'' is sufficiently cheap, and quality measurement sufficiently informative. We qualitatively test these predictions with empirical observation...