In processing industries, plant location decisions are costly and have consequences for firm profitability. When raw materials are heavy or perishable, transportation costs limit shipping distances and processors must compete locally for raw material inputs. To determine the likely profitability...

A stochastic frontier production function that incorporates a model for technical inefficiency effects is used to investigate the industrial production of Greek food industries. Panel data comes from 29 Greek firms in 1988 through 1992. Parameters considered in the model for inefficiency effects...

This study examines how marketing strategies of produce managers affect consumer expenditures for fresh fruit. A non-linear Almost Ideal Demand System was used to model the share equations for Gala apples, Fuji apples, Red Delicious apples, other sweet apples, tart apples, pears, bananas, and...

This paper employs the dual approach to trace the impact of public policy instruments upon the operational and financial performance of U.S. dairy cooperatives. A restricted profit function is applied to the Operations and Finance Statements for years 1980-1988 of thirty major dairy...

In many industrialized countries, the grocery-retailing sector exhibits a strong and in-creasing market concentration. Hence, it is important to understand retail pricing for many questions related to market power in the marketing chain and to agricultural and food policies. We analyze...

Conventional wisdom holds that a small and decreasing number of hog slaughter firms are using their "market power" to take advantage of U.S. hog producers. Existing studies have simply calculated industry concentration ratios and assumed/asserted that the performance of such a concentrated...

This paper examines agricultural cooperative organizational models from an ownership rights perspective. Building upon property rights and incomplete contracts theories of the firm, the paper adopts a definition of ownership rights comprising both residual claim and control rights. We argue that...