| In recent years increasing number of contractual arrangements in food chains are observed. There are several reasons for this phenomenon. Improving food quality often requires significant specific investments. Given high asset specificity, investors find it difficult to appropriate the returns on investment and thus have incentives to integrate. However, besides this transaction costs related argument, the ongoing vertical integration can result from structural developments in food chains which at different stages of the value chains, might hamper the proper functioning of markets. Using a unique, firm level dataset, in this paper we will focus on the latter issue. Due to its importance among various Hungarian value chains, we have selected the milk... |
