| The objective of this article is to describe and to analyse the basic relationships between control frequency, amount of fines, other social sanctions, the producers‘ capability to influence certain attributes (including costs of quality assurance) and damage incidence in the field of food and feedstuffs safety. For this purpose an economic model is developed that minimizes monitoring costs including (a) the harm prevented and (b) the revenues from fines. First, monitoring measures are optimized by exclusively taking account of the interests of consumers and taxpayers. In a second step, the model is enlarged by adding constraints relative to the costs of quality assurance so that aspects of both producer welfare and total social costs are explicitly... |
