IS-2135-93

Publications

Achievements

Pooling and Pricing Schemes for Marketing Agricultural Products	Budget	Duration
	$190,000	3 years

	Finkelshtain, I.	Cent Ag Econ Re
	Buccola, S.T.	Oregon St. U
	Bar-Shira, Z.	Cent Ag Econ Re

Final Report Abstract
In recent years there has been a growing concern over the performance of Israel and U.S. agricultural marketing organizations. In Israel, poor performance of some marketing institutions has led to radical reforms. Examples are the two leading export industries - citrus and flowers. In the U.S., growth of local market power is eliminating competitive row product prices which served as the basis for farmer cooperative payment plans. This research studies, theoretically, several aspects of the above problem and develops empirical methods to assess their relative importance. The theoretical part deals with two related aspects of the operation of processing and marketing firms. The first is the technological structure of these firms. To this end, we formalize a detailed theory that describes the production process itself and the firm's decision. The model accounts for multiple products and product characteristics. The usefulness of the theory for measurement of productivity and pricing of raw material is demonstrated. The second aspect of the processing and marketing firm that we study is unique to the agricultural sector, where many such firms are cooperatives. In such cooperative an efficient and fair mechanism for purchasing raw materials from members is crucial to successful performances of the firm. We focus on: 1) pricing of raw materials. 2) comparison of employment of quota and price regimes by the cooperative to regulate the quantities, supplied by members. We take into consideration that the cooperative management is subject to pressure from member farmers. 3) Tier pricing for raw materials in order to ensure efficiency and zero profits at the cooperative level. This problem is examined in both closed and open cooperatives. The empirical part focuses in: 1) the development of methodologies for estimating demand for differentiated products; 2) assessing farmers response to component pricing; 3) measurement of potential and actual exploitation of market power by an agricultural marketing firm. The usefulness of the developed methodologies are demonstrated by several application to agricultural sub-sectors, including: U.S. dairy industry, Oregon wine industry, Israeli Cotton industry and Israeli Citrus industry.