Volume 3, Issue 2

Over the past twenty years, the R&D-based agricultural biotechnology industry has exhibited cyclical behavior in consolidation. This paper provides a positive, theoretical model of endogenous R&D, in which the number of firms engaged in R&D exhibits cyclical behavior. Additional, empirically testable, behavioral characteristics of the model cycle include: the level of R&D activity is pro-cyclical, mergers and acquisitions activity and the time to discovery of the next innovation are counter-cyclical, and the duration of cyclic peaks (periods of high firm numbers) is short relative to periods of low firm numbers. The implication that the distribution of firm numbers over time is multi-modal is consistent with empirical evidence and is in contrast to studies of firm numbers in other industries. One policy implication is that anti-trust actions in agricultural biotechnology should be based on observed persistent, rather than cyclic, concentration.

Standard economic intuition of revealed preference implies that when two parties freely enter into a contract then neither should be worse off. In this study, we develop a simple model showing that introducing the opportunity to contract can lower welfare for some, and perhaps all, contracting parties. We consider a situation where processors can obtain inputs from suppliers (farmers) using either a spot market or contractual arrangements, and where spot market transaction costs depends on the volume of trade in the spot market. We show that contracting parties may lose when more contracting results in higher transaction costs for spot market participants. At the margin, firms and input suppliers gain from signing contracts. However, contracting raises spot-market transaction costs for those who do not sign contracts, which provides a greater incentive for others to sign contracts, ultimately inducing more contracting than optimal. The model demonstrates why structural or organizational change may be rapid and why the private minimization of transaction costs may not lead to optimal institutional arrangements.

Many of the North American railroads have introduced differentiated services for grain shipments in the past decade. Most interesting have been innovations in guaranteed railcar service which have evolved since their inception. In most cases, pricing and allocation of these services have used some type of bidding mechanism. This paper explores the strategic implications of these mechanisms for the grain shipping industry. A model was developed to analyze the effects of critical variables on equilibrium bids. The paper extends the literature on pricing and car allocation mechanisms whereby auctions are used as an alternative to negotiations and posted-prices in the rail transport sector.

In this Comment, I examine federal courts’ hesitation to apply the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 to address the consolidation of the meatpacking industry. A currently pending case, Pickett v. IBP, represents an opportunity for federal courts to apply the Act to combat that consolidation, and I argue that Pickett—the first class action suit granted class certification under the antitrust provision of the Act—represents an opportunity for the judiciary to reform the meatpacking industry by addressing issues of equal access to the market.

In the presence of scarce shelf space, retail grocers face the proliferation of new products and high failure rates. Accurately predicting the demand for a new product becomes increasingly difficult for retailers as the number of product offerings increases. This study explores slotting allowances and failure fees as mechanisms to screen new products' demand distributions. Mechanism design framework and two moments of the product demand distribution are utilized to eliminate mean-variance dominated products and separate non-dominated products by their demand distributions. Model results suggest that accurately designed menus of contracts including retail prices, slotting allowances, failure fees (or success rebates) and sales targets can separate products by their demand distributions and alleviate asymmetric information problems.

While the development of empirical models of seller conduct abound, arguably less attention has been paid to the development of empirical models of buyer conduct. This is especially problematic in studies of food and agricultural industries where high buyer concentration along the supply chain is the norm. The purpose of this paper is to provide one more tool in the toolkit of econometric estimation of oligopsony behavior, in particular for those cases where researchers may have rather limited data sets. We derive a set of equations to estimate buyer market power with fewer equations and less formal functional specifications than are typically used in such studies. We apply the model to the U.S. rice industry finding a degree of oligopsony behavior consistent with that found in studies of other agricultural markets.

International Financial Institutions have advocated the privatization of integrated agricultural monopsonies in developing countries with the hope that competition between private firms under a contract farming system would reduce inefficiencies in production and enable farmers to obtain a higher share of world commodity prices. Using a very simple theoretical model, this paper shows however that the impact of privatization and contract farming may not be positive for all farmers.

This paper examines how ownership structure affects endogenous quality choice and the subsequent equilibrium outcomes. Investor owned firms (IOFs) and producer cooperatives (COOPs) are analyzed within a duopoly framework including a primary and a secondary level. The firms play a two-stage game, first simultaneously choosing the level of quality to produce and then compete in prices. It is shown that if the cost of quality at primary level is fixed, and/or variable exhibiting non-constant returns to scale, firms can have a structural cost advantage due to ownership structure in addition to the high-quality advantage identified in the previous literature.In the case of a fixed cost of quality at primary level, it is shown that although IOFs charge higher prices they generate a larger consumer surplus than COOPs by marketing higher qualities. Cooperatives generate a larger producer surplus while the market share of the high-quality good is independent of ownership structure. In the case of a variable cost of quality at primary level, a cooperative firm possesses a structural cost advantage which is used to market larger quantities of higher levels of quality generating larger profits, larger consumer surplus and larger social welfare. Policy implications of the different structures are discussed.

In Europe, food retailing has become more concentrated and private label goods have spread over the last 40 years. They are now a key element of retailers' shelf offer. Using a model in which consumers become informed about the good's quality only in period two, we examine what determines the presence or absence of private label experience goods in supermarkets, taking into account the retailer's reputation commitment involved. Our most novel result is that for products purchased infrequently, introducing a reputable private label is unsustainable. However, more retailer bargaining power increases the likelihood of a private label good being marketed.