one cow one vote we study investment decisions in a farmers cooperative farmers sell their products through the cooperative before production takes place the cooperative has to decide on an investment we study whether voting on investment leads to efficient investment decisions the answer depends on how the number of votes and the cost of the investment are distributed among the farmers it is shown that in a variety of settings there is no reason to suppose that voting rules favoring large farmers one cow one vote rules are more efficient than simple majority rule

horizontal carrier coordination through cooperative governance structures this paper examines how governance structures found in the trucking industry impact the coordination between a forwarder and its carriers including three cases no forwarder coordination direct contracting with shippers investor owned coordination price only contract and carrier cooperative coordination revenue sharing contract the carriers are engaged in a cournot competition where they decide upon service provision and truck investment economic theory predicts that integration of firms under oligopolistic competition always leads to a more efficient supply chain in the sense that prices decrease and quantities increase which reduces total profits this suggests that the benefit of avoiding double marginalization does not outweigh the benefit of upstream competition in the successive oligopoly case whereas both integrated and independent firms coexist the integrated chains do perform better in this paper we examine the interaction between governance structures a key decision when managing supply chains including that found in the trucking industry and shippers willingness to procure trucking services instead of producing them using a private fleet we find that cooperative governance can contribute to improved service provision reduced service price improved consumer surplus and improved profit for the carriers in equilibrium we use parameter values based on the swedish trucking industry and a larger grocery retailer acting as shipper to numerically illustrate the impact of different governance structures

cooperatives as entrants a potential shortcoming of game theoretic models in industrial organization is their failure to consider consumers as players we introduce a customer coalition a cooperative as a potential entrant and compare the cooperative entry threat with that posed by the usualforprofit entrant we identify four fundamental distinctions between cooperative andfor profit entrants and demonstrate that the strategic interplay between a cooperative and an incumbent firm may differ markedly from that between the incumbent and a for profit entrant the results impart a prospectively powerful role to potential cooperatives in beneficially regulating free market performance

a century of research on agricultural markets this article provides a perspective on major innovations in research on agricultural markets over the past century we review research on market structure and performance vertical coordination arrangements and institutions for producer collective action contributions to empirical modeling of agricultural price determination and marketing margins are also evaluated as are innovations in research on spatial market relationships and the role of storage finally we discuss contributions to understanding market information systems and the functioning of market based mechanisms for agri

irrigation districts and water markets an application of cooperative decision making theory water supply organizations control a large portion of agricultural water rights in the western u s this paper applies cooperative and club theory models to analyze the response of these organizations to potential rural to urban water transfers application of the models is to a proposed water trade between southern california s imperial irrigation district and metropolitan water district the analysis reveals that substantial intraorganizational conflict can emerge in response to specific transfer proposals and this conflict may be sufficient to defeat or delay otherwise beneficial transfers poorly defined property rights and a failure to align these rights with operational control in the water supply organization are pinpointed as key sources of conflict

producer organizations bargaining and asymmetric information as pointed out by sexton a cooperative s pricing rule can be affected by divergent interests of heterogeneous members when such competing interests are present production decisions may depart from the first best optimum and the marginal cost pricing rule cum fee rebate may no longer be implementable in a recent article vercammen fulton and hyde study such departures assuming a con tinuum of producers types and a nondiscri minating management board while their sim ulation analysis indicates that the first best is sometimes attainable in such instances their theoretical analysis seems to suggest it is not this article extends the analysis of the in centive problems faced in producers orga nization by assuming that the different farmer types constitute different groups with differ ent bargaining powers departures from an equal sharing of the oligopolistic gain appear as long as the bargaining power of a group does not correspond to its relative importance in the farm population however when bargaining disparities are small enough the quantities produced will still correspond to first best levels and incentive compatible sharing of the oligopolistic gain can be effected by a mixture of two part pricing and nonlinear cost recovery when the less more cost efficient farmers have sufficiently high bargaining power the redistributive objective conflicts with efficiency and the organization overproduces underproduces compared to the first best level moreover the nonlinear scheme may be implemented by offering two two part schedules one with a unit price equal to the marginal revenue that members of the less powerful group choose and the other with a unit price greater or lower than this level depending on the productivity of the most influential group this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

constitutional selection of collective choice rules in a cooperative enterprise abstract constitutional choice in a cooperative enterprise as embodied in its articles of incorporation is viewed as a problem of selecting an efficient long term contract economizing on transaction costs dictates recourse to collective choice rules each of which defines a game among cooperative members multiple game solutions along with individual members ignorance as to their future socio economic position create uncertainty with respect to members payoff at the operating phase constitutional selection of collective choice rules and their assignment to collective choice problem areas seeks to minimize the sum of bargaining costs and the members risk premia

distributional effects of agricultural cooperatives in china exclusion of smallholders and potential gains on participation abstract this paper examines the treatment effects of the agricultural cooperative and publicly funded extension services on individual household economy using data collected by the author from watermelon producing farm households in rural nanjing the cooperative addressed in this study restricts the participation of small scale farmers implying that selection into the program must be taken into consideration for an accurate assessment of the treatment effect the econometric analysis revealed that government extension services have a modest effect on farm income in contrast the treatment effect of the agricultural cooperative is robust and substantially large accounting for nearly 70 of the pre matching difference this suggests that the agricultural cooperative system is an important avenue for farmers to improve their economic status the treatment effect of the agricultural cooperative is highly heterogeneous the economic benefits arising from the cooperative are significant only for small scale farms we can argue that a coexistence of smallholder exclusion and the treatment effect in favor of small scale farms poses serious challenges to pro poor agricultural growth in china

rent sharing in multi site hog production a firm level model of three site hog production is used compare a franchise organizational structure to a three firm alliance the results of the simulations imply that the franchise system is better equipped to mitigate underproduction in the nursery and finishing units the nursery and finishing units lose relatively more profit than they otherwise would in an alliance the pig space guatantee does little to offset the financial risk for the nursery and finishing units when underproduction occurs upstream breeding gestation and farrowing unit

the measurement and influences of china s urban total factor energy efficiency under environmental pollution based on the game cross efficiency dea abstract in recent years urban energy efficiency has received much attention from researchers however ignorance of the competitive relationships among regions results in inaccurate energy efficiency game cross efficiency data envelopment analysis dea which can account for the competitive relationships is a reliable method to measure energy efficiency first this paper applies game cross efficiency dea to analyze the urban total factor energy efficiency utfee of 26 chinese prefectural level cities from 2005 to 2015 under environmental constraints then a comparative analysis and a concrete analysis are conducted based on the urban energy efficiency finally a tobit model is used to examine the effects of 10 potential influence factors the measurement results show that the urban energy efficiency considering the competitive relationship is lower than the traditionally calculated efficiency additionally the urban energy efficiency did not improve during the research period furthermore regression analysis suggests that economic development and city scale can promote urban energy efficiency while government expenditure industrial structures energy prices foreign investments research investments and production endowment have negative impacts on urban energy efficiency according to our results some implications of theory and practice are discussed for researchers and policy makers

a two step econometric estimation of covariates of side selling the case of coffee cooperatives in southwest ethiopia despite their apparent economic benefit to smallholder farmers cooperatives are vulnerable to the problem of side selling using cross sectional household data and cragg s regression model we ide

understanding retained patronage refunds in agricultural cooperatives the share of patronage refunds retained by an agricultural cooperative is modeled as arising from the portfolio decision of its median member the member is viewed as maximizing expected utility by allocating wealth between investments in farming assets and equity in the cooperative determinants of the share of patronage refunds retained are the expected rates of return on these two investments their variances their covariance and the expected future share of patronage and its variance empirical examinations of aggregate cooperative data and cross section analysis of seventeen regional supply cooperatives are found to be consistent with the model

multilateralizing trade and payments in postwar europe europe s postwar shift to multilateral trade and payments arrangements was complicated by three factors distributional problems and uncertainty about the state of the world made european governments reluctant to adopt multilateral arrangements without financial support from the united states an enforcement problem made u s policymakers reluctant to finance a european multilateral trading system the severity of these problems was reduced by institutional designs that combined flexibility centralization and particular decision rules centralization and flexibility reduced uncertainty and softened distributive conflict centralization and particular decision rules solved the enforcement problem that u s policymakers faced

optimal two part pricing in a carbon offset market a comparison of organizational types author affiliation murray fulton johnson shoyama graduate school of public policy diefenbaker building university of saskatchewan saskatoon sk s7n 5b8 canada e mail murray fulton usask ca corresponding author james vercammen food and resource economics and sauder school of business 2053 main mall university of british columbia vancouver bc v6t 1z2 canada e mail james vercammen ubc ca acknowledgment the authors would like to thank tom ross and ralph winter for valuable comments on an early version of this article as well as the southern economic journal editor and two anonymous reviewers the usual caveats apply 1 introductionone of the consequences of the kyoto protocol kp and the increased focus on the role of greenhouse gases ghgs in climate change is that market based approaches to reducing ghg emissions are being actively developed in europe the european union eu operates an emissions trading scheme ets 1 while in the united states the chicago climate exchange ccx trades carbon offsets among exchange members 2 in canada a number of provinces have announced plans for carbon trading schemes four of them have joined the western climate initiative wci a consortium of canadian provinces and states developing a regional cap and trade system wci 2008 the wci and the regional greenhouse gas initiative rggi a consortium of northeastern and mid atlantic states see rggi 2008 are part of the international carbon action partnership a group of countries and regions from around the world that has formed to actively pursue the development of mandatory cap and trade systems in carbon 3the agriculture and forestry sectors are likely to be important suppliers of carbon offsets to the carbon market both through carbon sequestration activities for example the storing of carbon in the soil or in trees and through activities that reduce ghg emissions for instance estimates made by the united states at the time the kp was being negotiated projected that forest cropland and grazing land management sinks could have accounted for about half of u s reduction commitments u s department of state 2002 in canada the federal government estimated that agricultural and forestry sinks could provide in the order of 15 20 million metric tons of carbon offsets relative to a total of 270 300 million metric tons of reductions required under the kp government of canada 2005 food and agricultural organization fao estimates indicate that dryland soils in the world could sequester somewhere in the range of 12 000 16 000 million metric tons of carbon fao 2004 in the case of agriculture since carbon offsets are sold in units that are much larger than most individual farmers can supply carbon sequestration from a number of producers must be aggregated to fulfill contracts 4 as a consequence market intermediaries or aggregators as they are known are emerging to perform this economic function some of these aggregators are organized as for profit firms while others are organized by farmers associations examples of for profit firms are as follows c green aggregators ltd a privately owned company that contracts with farmers in manitoba saskatchewan and alberta for carbon sequestration the carbon they acquire is sold on the ccx c green aggregators 2008 and agcert international an irish company founded to generate emission reductions from livestock farms agcert international 2008 much of agcert s sales of carbon credits has been direct to individual emitters on the producer association side the iowa farm bureau has created agragate climate credits corporation to aggregate carbon credits for sale on the ccx agragate climate credits corporation 2008 agragate administers the project transacts trades on the exchange and distributes earnings to project participants

the flypaper effect and other anomalies abstract i develop a model in which income both in its own right and as a proxy for other socioeconomic characteristics is an input in the production function for local public services the most obvious example is education though there are other applications as well the comparative statics results from this model yield the following results 1 the observed flypaper effect the tendency for local government to spend a higher fraction of unrestricted grants than income of residents may be due at least in part to the fact that own income but not grants is a substitute for purchased inputs in the technology hence the propensity to spend on purchased inputs out of own income is lower than out of grants 2 the income elasticity of demand for public sector output may be higher than the observed income elasticity of demand for purchased inputs 3 equalization of educational opportunity via wealth neutrality as suggested by feldstein requires major changes in education finance once we recognice the distinction between purchased inputs and output

the formation of cooperatives a game theoretic approach with implications for cooperative finance decision making and stability this paper departs from the traditional organization oriented approach to cooperative analysis it exploits cooperation s functional similarity to vertical integration to examine individuals incentives to form cooperatives a model of formation of a purchasing cooperative is presented and developed as an n person game with the core as a solution concept core existence is examined for both single and multiple cooperative configurations and cooperative finance methods are examined relative to finding core compatible allocation rules the results provide insight into a cooperative s equilibrium output stability decision making financing methods and choice of open or restricted membership

quantifying value chain analysis in the context of livestock systems in developing countries the analysis of value chains has augmented our knowledge on the complexities inter linkages distributional benefits and institutional arrangements of production and marketing channels in developing countries however the analysis remains relatively qualitative and case specific with limited ability to rank or assess the impact of alternative interventions or to analyze sufficiently the complex market dynamics and feedbacks present in livestock systems this paper offers theoretical and applied insights on ways to improve the analytical rigor of the value chain methodology that combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches

cooperative pricing and scale efficiency the case of korean rice processing complexes unlike most investor owned enterprises cooperatives often have freedom to choose among a variety of firm objectives using 2002 2008 plantand province level data we ask in the present article which of several alternative maximands a korean cooperative rice processing firm pursues in contrast to earlier studies farmer member supply functions are incorporated into the cooperative s optimization framework we show that only large cooperative firms have operated at efficient scale while small and medium sized ones have been scale inefficient because the latter operate where scale returns are increasing mergers of small and medium sized cooperatives likely would be cost reducing and member return enhancing

customer ownership and quality provision in public services under asymmetric information the implementation of projects producing external effects is often a source of disagreement and conflict between hosting and nonhosting communities the article focuses on the impact of participatory ownership on conflict resolution and social welfare in the presence of asymmetric information and imperfect quality monitoring we show that in such situations the participatory solution may help solve deadlocks that money transfers to a for profit operator cannot solve the analysis highlights three main factors behind this fact first a customer owned cooperative internalizes at least partially the external effects generated by the project second the alignment of cooperative members preferences with those of the social planner reduces in some cases eliminates the distortions caused by information asymmetries third cooperatives require less costly monitoring than their for profit counterparts we also show that cooperatives productive inefficiency with respect to for profits may emerge endogenously as a consequence of a lower pressure to compete on costs for the market