The stickiness of prices and reasons for price changes are widely discussed in market analyses and marketing theory. Explanations and reasons of rigidities have shown that prices do not change as often in small retail stores and in markets with high concentration (Powers and Powers 2001, Hannan...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are fighting for survival due to globalization, growing competition with big retailers, and strategies adopted by large industrial companies. Difficulties in pricing are also revealed in the literature. Therefore, appropriate activity is needed to be...

Grain markets in Germany, as in the rest of the world, are becoming more and more volatile. At the same time, the consolidation process on the level of the first hand, buying the grain from farmers, is moving forward in a strong pace, leaving farmers with less local alternatives to sell their...

The main consumer trends in food sector are two: on the one hand there is a growing demand for modernity (functional foods, convenience foods, healthy foods such as low calories and low-sodium foods), on the other hand there is a increasing demands for naturalness (organic foods, natural foods,...

The introduction of the environmental dimensions within the Public Administration procurements and contracts is increasingly held as contribution to the sustainability of the chains governance. The so called Green Procurement (COM (2001) 274, l.n.488/1999) thus represents an important...

This paper investigates the long-run relationship between spot and futures prices for corn and soybeans, for the period January 2004 -September 2010. We apply cointegration methodology in the presence of potentially unknown structural breaks in the commodities prices and we then study the...

Following the occurrence of meat safety incidents during the nineties (Verbeke et al., 1999), considerable effort has been done to improve safety in the beef chain, both by policy and beef chain actors. Nowadays, a wide array of interventions to improve beef safety is applied at different stages...

The agro-food sector is receiving a great deal of attention for topics of general interest as the food quality, security and safety, alternative uses of crops in food/feed/fuel, growing concern for GHG (Green House Gas) emission, LCA (Life Cycle Assessment), energy consumption. In the EU...

European society, with its steadily increased welfare levels, is not only concerned about food (safety, prices), but also on other aspects such as biodiversity loss, landscape degradation, pollution of water, soil and atmosphere. To a large extent these concerns can be translated into a wider...

The contemporary agrifood sectors have witnessed a rapid increase in the use of intangibles, i.e. inputs built upon information, knowledge and communication assets. Consequently firms, in their move towards competitiveness, try to innovate in line with these trends. Innovations in agrifood...