This article explores the issue of cooperative growth from both an empirical and theoretical perspective. Using total assets as the measure of cooperative size, we present long-term, time-series data from seven of the largest regional agricultural cooperatives in Canada and the United States. We...

North Dakota and Minnesota are currently witnessing a renewal in the growth of cooperative enterprises. At the heart of this renewal lies the so-called New Generation Cooperative (NGC), a term that has been applied to the dozens of value-added processing, selected membership cooperatives that...

This paper examines how agency problems combined with overconfidence and hubris by coop management lead to financial failure in the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. As a consequence of both of these problems, the Pool made poor investment decisions and ended up in severe financial difficulties. These...

The cases assembled in this special issue provide a rich setting for an examination of a number of cooperative conversion and restructurings that have occurred over the last 10 years. The cases also provide some lessons on the larger cooperative problems and questions in which cooperative...

The traditional pricing mechanism examined in the economic literature on cooperatives is uniform (or linear) pricing. The conclusion of the literature is that uniform pricing mechanisms will often give rise to economic inefficiencies. These inefficiencies emerge when the cooperative is operating...

This study builds on the literature on the economics of output quotas in the presence of cheating. We extend previous work by Giannakas and Fulton (2000a) by examining the decisions of the agency responsible for the enforcement of output quotas in a decentralized policy-making structure....

This study builds on previous work by Giannakas and Fulton (2003, 2000) on the economics of output quotas in the presence of cheating by examining the efficiency of the policy in transferring income to producers as well as the optimal regulatory response to enforcement costs and farmer...

The emergence of agricultural biotechnology and the subsequent introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the food system have been among the most controversial issues surrounding the increasingly scrutinized agri-food system. They have received considerable attention in the...

This paper analyzes the market and welfare effects of the introduction of GM products in small open developing economies that, prior to the adoption of GM crops, were net exporters of non-GM products. It explicitly accounts for differences in consumer attitudes towards GM products and producer...