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| Registros recuperados: 13 | |
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| Hueth, Brent; Marcoul, Philippe. |
| We develop a financial-contracting theory of the cooperative firm where production requires three generic tasks: working, managing, and monitoring. Workers provide an intermediate input (or labor directly); managers convert the workers' input into a final output; and directors monitor managers. We model the cooperative firm by letting the workers act also as directors. We show how bundling the labor and monitoring tasks can expand the scope for equilibrium market activity, even when doing so results in a strictly positive deadweight loss. Our theory provides new insight with respect to a substantial theoretical and empirical literature on the “life cycle” of worker-managed firms, and with respect to a complementary body of anecdotal evidence on the causes... |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Labor and Human Capital; Production Economics. |
| Ano: 2007 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/92122 |
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| Hueth, Brent; Marcoul, Philippe. |
| We study incentives for information sharing (about uncertain future demand for final output) among firms in imperfectly competitive markets for farm output. Information sharing generally leads to increases in expected total welfare but may reduce expected firm profits. Even when expected firm profits increase, information sharing does not represent equilibrium behavior because firms face a prisoner?s dilemma in which it is privately rational for each firm to withhold information, given that other firms report truthfully. This equilibrium can be overcome if firms commit to simultaneously reporting their information and if reports are verifiable. We argue that agricultural bargaining associations serve both these roles. |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Agricultural markets; Bargaining; Imperfect competition; Information; Marketing. |
| Ano: 2002 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/18576 |
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| Hueth, Brent; Marcoul, Philippe; Ginder, Roger G.. |
| We use historical variation in the market share of agricultural cooperatives to examine the nature of the cooperative firm. Our data include the share of sectoral output accounted for by cooperative firms across 15 commodity sectors during the period 1930-2002. We test a simple financial contracting model where the cooperative firm is viewed as a particular implementation of "monitored credit" (or "informed intermediation"). Controlling for sectoral and year effects, we find support for the main prediction of our model with a positive and statistically significant relationship between cooperative market share and real annual lending rates. |
| Tipo: Conference Paper or Presentation |
Palavras-chave: Agribusiness. |
| Ano: 2005 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/19324 |
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| Hueth, Brent; Marcoul, Philippe. |
| This paper identifies market and commodity characteristics that seem to support successful cooperative bargaining in markets for farm output. Bargaining is not just about increasing prices paid to farmers; indeed, although there is very little empirical research that addresses the issue, what evidence does exist suggests that cooperative bargaining has very little direct influence on price. Nevertheless, the price negotiation process may be useful in itself as a form of price discovery in markets where there is uncertainty about market supply and demand conditions, and bargaining associations can play an important role in ensuring contract reliability. These and other benefits must be weighed against the organizational and ongoing operational costs of a... |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Agricultural markets; Cooperative bargaining; Imperfect competition; Marketing. |
| Ano: 2002 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/18526 |
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| Hueth, Brent; Marcoul, Philippe; Ginder, Roger G.. |
| Cooperative formation in agriculture sometimes occurs in response to the exit of a private firm and typically requires substantial equity investment by participating farmers. What economic rationale can explain why farmers are willing to contribute capital to an activity that (apparently) fails to attract non-farm or "private" investment? We hypothesize that farm capital is high cost, relative to that provided by private entrepreneurs (or in other words, that there is a degree of asset fixity in farm capital) but that it engenders greater organizational commitment-which is particularly important when expected market returns are low-on the part of producers. This commitment arises from the indirect incentive properties associated with at-risk capital. We... |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Cooperative; Corporate financing; Moral hazard; Vertical integration; Agribusiness. |
| Ano: 2003 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/18478 |
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| Hueth, Brent; Marcoul, Philippe; Ginder, Roger G.. |
| The West Liberty Foods turkey cooperative formed in 1996 to purchase the assets and assume operations of Louis Rich Foods. Based on field interviews with grower members and company management, we describe changes in the economic relationship between growers and the company that resulted from the purchase. We argue that many of the observed changes are consistent with a financial-contracting view of the cooperative firm where the bundling of input-supply and board activities generates a reduction in agency rents that compensates for the organizational deadweight loss traditionally associated with cooperative governance. |
| Tipo: Journal Article |
Palavras-chave: Agribusiness. |
| Ano: 2009 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/56890 |
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| Marcoul, Philippe; Lawrence, John D.; Hueth, Brent. |
| Participants in U.S. markets for live cattle increasingly rely on federal grading standards to price slaughtered animals. This change is due to the growing prominence of "grid" pricing mechanisms that specify explicit premiums and discounts contingent on an animal's graded quality class. Although these changes alter the way cattle are priced, the technology for sorting animals into quality classes has changed very little: human graders visually inspect each slaughtered carcass and call a "quality" and "yield" grade in a matter of seconds as the carcass passes on a moving trolley. There is anecdotal evidence of systematic bias in these called grades across time and regions within U.S. markets. We examine whether such claims are supported in a sample of... |
| Tipo: Conference Paper or Presentation |
Palavras-chave: Marketing. |
| Ano: 2006 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/21123 |
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| Marcoul, Philippe; Veyssiere, Luc. |
| In developing countries, modern production contracts offered by supermarkets or agro-export firms entail a loan component under the form of input advances. Like traditional moneylenders, supermarkets want to make sure that this investment is not diverted. However, unlike moneylenders, supermarkets do care about the attributes of the product (form, quality, food safety, etc.). Whether such attributes are present in the harvested product is largely influenced by the advice and the extension services received by the farmer. We built a financial contracting model where we show that supermarkets, choosing to forgo specialization, optimally delegate to a multi-tasking agent both the monitoring and the advisory missions. This contract is shown to potentially... |
| Tipo: Conference Paper or Presentation |
Palavras-chave: Food Standards; Organization of Production; Supermarket; Agricultural Finance; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety. |
| Ano: 2008 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/43862 |
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| Hueth, Brent; Marcoul, Philippe. |
| We study incentives for information sharing (about uncertain future demand for final output) among agricultural intermediaries in imperfectly competitive markets for farm output. Information sharing always increases expected grower and consumer surplus, but may reduce expected intermediary profits. Even when expected intermediary profits increase with information sharing, firms face a Prisoner's Dilemma where it is privately rational for each firm to withhold information, given that other firms report truthfully. This equilibrium can be avoided if firms' information reports are verifiable, and if firms commit to an ex ante contract that forces ex post information revelation. We argue that agricultural bargaining represents one means to achieve... |
| Tipo: Conference Paper or Presentation |
Palavras-chave: Agribusiness. |
| Ano: 2003 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/22232 |
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| Hueth, Brent; Marcoul, Philippe; Ginder, Roger G.. |
| Cooperative formation in agriculture sometimes occurs in response to the exit of a private firm and typically requires substantial equity investment by participating farmers. What economic rationale can explain why farmers are willing to contribute capital to an activity that fails to attract non-farm, or "private" investment? We hypothesize that doing so is a costly mechanism for increasing the maximum penalty farmers face in the case of business failure. For a given market environment, exposing farmers to this risk increases the amount of surplus that can be used to repay lenders, thus expanding the set of market environments in which financing is available. We show how equity investment of this sort can be an efficient organizational response to a... |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Cooperative; Corporate finance; Moral hazard; Vertical integration; Agribusiness; Marketing. |
| Ano: 2004 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/18610 |
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| Hueth, Brent; Lawrence, John D.; Marcoul, Philippe. |
| Participants in U.S. markets for live cattle increasingly rely on federal grading standards to price slaughtered animals. This change is due to the growing prominence of grid pricing mechanisms that specify explicit premiums and discounts contingent on an animal's graded quality class. Although there have been recent changes in the way cattle are priced, the technology for sorting animals into quality classes has changed very little: human graders visually inspect each slaughtered carcass and call a quality and yieldgrade in a matter of seconds as the carcass passes on a moving trolley. There is anecdotal evidence of systematic bias in these called grades across time and regions within U.S. markets, and this paper empirically examines whether such... |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Cattle markets; Grader bias; Quality measurement; Livestock Production/Industries. |
| Ano: 2004 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/18474 |
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| Ginder, Roger G.; Hueth, Brent; Marcoul, Philippe. |
| The West Liberty Foods turkey cooperative was formed in 1996 to purchase the assets and assume operations of Louis Rich Foods (an investor-owned processing firm), which, at the time, announced the imminent shutdown of its West Liberty, Iowa, processing facility. We study the creation and performance of this "new generation" cooperative using field interviews with grower members and company management. We describe changes, before and after the buyout, in the contractual apparatus used for procuring live turkeys, and in the communication requirements, work expectations, and financial positions of growers. During the private ownership period, most of the inputs (except labor and facilities) were provided by the firm; there was substantial supervision of the... |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Cooperatives; Procurement; Financial contracting; Agriculture; Agribusiness. |
| Ano: 2005 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/18583 |
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| Registros recuperados: 13 | |
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