Volume 7, Issue 1

This paper analyzes the interactions between generic advertising, brand advertising, and firm profits when brand advertising is purely informative. We develop duopoly models with vertical and horizontal differentiation when brand advertising lowers consumer search costs of identifying brand characteristics. The model demonstrates that firms can benefit from investing in brand advertising that lowers consumer search costs as well as from brand advertising that is purely persuasive. In addition, the results demonstrate that regardless of whether brand advertising is persuasive or informative, the outcome is more likely to be symmetric with horizontal differentiation than with vertical differentiation. The key distinction between this model and that of previous studies is that brand advertising across rivals is a strategic complement when persuasive and a strategic substitute when informative.

With about $250 million in sales, India's cotton seed market is one of the largest cotton seed markets in the world. While products of public sector breeding traditionally dominated this sector, the bulk of value is now accounted by private seed firms. A persistent criticism of the Indian cotton seed market is that there are far too many cotton varieties as the private sector recycles older and inferior varieties under new names. This paper examines the phenomenon of variety proliferation in the cotton seed market of Maharashtra, India. Empirical evidence is presented from a survey of seed dealers in 2005. The evidence shows that while variety proliferation is indeed observed, the cause of it is private bred hybrids that are highly localized and which are rarely market leaders. Only a few varieties are dominant geographically and they command price premiums suggesting brand power. Firm and brand reputations matter and substitute for regulation by restricting fly-by-night operators.

We estimate the economies of scale for a sample of pork packing plants and use these estimates together with two other performance measures (EBIT and gross margin) to examine whether the alternative procurement methods for live hogs are complementary. The results indicate that all procurement arrangements portfolios improve plant performance relative to the simple spot market purchases, but the portfolio coefficients in performance equations do not always monotonically increase with the portfolio order. However, looking at the price packers pay to procure their hogs, the results indicate that plants that use a combination of higher-order procurement arrangements on average pay lower prices relative to plants that use the spot market only. Comparing the magnitudes of the portfolio effects with the magnitudes of the individual procurement arrangement effects shows that individual practices have minimal additional impact on the procurement price, indicating that the procurement methods may be complementary.

Under price ceilings and quality floors for agricultural inputs in cash crop sectors in developing countries where credit markets are weak, imperfect information on the ability of farmers to pay for their inputs at the end of the cropping season may lead the decentralized production of those inputs by risk averse private input providers to be inefficient. A coordinating agency and/or subsidies for new farmers could help to produce and distribute more agricultural inputs, thereby increasing the profits for input providers while also enabling more farmers to produce the crops that are key to their livelihood.

The potential existence of buyer power in U.K. food retailing has attracted the scrutiny of the U.K.'s anti-trust authorities, culminating in the second of two comprehensive regulatory inquiries in recent years. Such inquiries are authoritative but correspondingly time-consuming and costly. Moreover, detection of buyer power has been dogged by the paucity of reliable evidence of its existence. In this paper, we present a simple theoretical model of oligopsony which delivers quasi-reduced form retailer-producer pricing equations with which the null of perfect competition can be tested using readily available market data. Using a cointegrated vector autoregression, we find empirical results that show the null of perfect competition can be rejected in seven of the nine food products investigated. Though not conclusive on the existence of buyer power, the proposed test offers a means via which the behaviour of the retail-producer price spread is consistent with it. At the very least, it can corroborate the concerns of the anti-trust authorities as to whether buyer power is potentially one source of concern.

This paper studies asymmetries in the magnitude of price transmission from farm to retail markets in a simple framework consisting of three stages of the market chain: farm, wholesale, and retail. The effects of farm supply curvature and buyer power in farm markets, in addition to those of consumer demand curvature and seller power in retail markets, on asymmetries in price transmission are examined. Strict convexity of farm supply and wholesalers/processors' buyer power in farm markets are shown to be a main reason for asymmetries in the magnitude of farm-retail price transmission. The effect of consumer demand curvature and seller power in retail markets on farm-retail price transmission is often indeterminate and tends to be relatively small.

This paper aims to show that an institutional arrangement such as brokerage is an efficient coordination mechanism to mitigate the contractual hazards in the relationship between merchants and wine growers. We explain its efficiency by considering brokers as independent experts that can help merchants to monitor the growers' wine-making process. More precisely, when the merchant cannot observe the grower's production effort and finds it costly to commit to a credible monitoring of the wine quality process, it can be efficient to delegate the monitoring task to the broker. Thus, delegation to a third party has a commitment effect.

With the exception of Azzam and Skinner (2007), the economic literature on farm structure has largely neglected issues of vertical organization of the farm. In this article we estimate a multi-stage, multi-output cost function in order to measure vertical economies of scope in organic and conventional dairy farms. In particular, we model the integration of production of grains and forages on dairy farms. We find negligible vertical economies of scope for conventional dairy farms but significant vertical economies of scope in organic dairy production. The large vertical economies of scope for organic dairy farms are consistent with higher costs of obtaining organic feed through market transactions associated with an underdeveloped market for organic feeds.

The decision to write contracts for production of commodities can be framed as an institutional response to changing industry and market conditions. When innovations increase available rents to technology owners (or technology appropriators), contracts can replace cash market transactions even though contracts carry higher transaction costs. We proceed by first fully documenting technological innovation in the broiler industry and tracing the evolution of contracts in the broiler industry. Next, we adopt a stylistic model to demonstrate how technological innovation might induce a switch to contract sales from cash market transactions. This paper contributes to the literature by investigating major institutional change in the broiler industry through an integrated analysis that weaves together industry history with elements of institutional economics, transaction cost theory, and game-theoretic economic analysis.