Interviews with Missouri corn and soybean farmers reveal what farmers feel are the most important ethical challenges in agriculture. In contrast to the literature, which characterizes ethical challenges in term of philosophical debates about soil conservation, the use of pesticides and...

The paper analyzes the problem of asymmetric information between buyers and sellers in cattle auctions. An illustration is made regarding the vaccinations that the animals receive. Buyers do not know and cannot verify if sellers have vaccinated their animals forcing them to consider...

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...

Organizational and contract economics have achieved an increasingly important role in analyses of the food, agribusiness, and agricultural sectors. In particular, formal theoretical models of contract design and firm integration have begun to appear in the leading agricultural economics...

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...

According to empirical evidence, extrinsic incentives often crowd out intrinsic motivation, thus reducing the effort choices of workers. This article presents a principal-agent model that incorporates insights from cognitive evaluation theory in order to show how the introduction of explicit...

This paper tests the hypothesis that capital market imperfections constrained the growth of British firms during the Industrial Revolution. Using data on the cost structure of a representative British cotton manufacturer during the 1798 to 1827 period, this paper shows that the scale of...

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...

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...