The Performance Of Agricultural Marketing Cooperatives In Differentiated Product Markets

Author : Sunny Lynn Jardine
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781303539046
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (39 download)

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Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Marketing Cooperatives in Fisheries written by Sunny Lynn Jardine and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 2: The degradation of product quality is one form of rent dissipation resulting from incomplete property rights in fisheries. Industry structure and information asymmetries can also lead to inefficiencies stemming from an underinvestment in product quality, even when property rights are well-defined. In this chapter, I test empirically whether the voluntary formation of a marketing cooperative can mitigate several market failures that lead to the production of inferior product quality. Specifically, I estimate using difference-in-differences methods the impact that the Copper River Fishermans Cooperative, an Alaskan salmon marketing cooperative, had on ex-vessel salmon prices and salmon quality measures. I find that indeed the cooperative was able to both improve product quality via self-enforced rules on harvesting and they were able to attract and sustain a higher price for their salmon. Chapter 3: A common phrase in the marketing cooperative literature is that co- operatives must be "born of necessity". Current literature has focused on cooperatives as institutions of necessity on the extensive margin, e.g. necessity for cooperative formation. In this chapter, I explore the degree to which the adage holds on the intensive margin, i.e. necessity for increasing members' level of participation. I use a dynamic within-season optimal control model of a representative cooperative member's sales decisions to establish that there is a negative relationship between the dock price for fish and the fraction of member harvest sold to the cooperative. The results from the optimal control model generate a hypothesis that I test empirically in two ways: First, I provide structural estimates of the parameters in the optimal control model and assess how well my simple model describes observed member sales decisions. Second, I provide a reduced-form analysis using linear probability models to describe the impact of salmon prices on the probability that a member delivers harvest to the cooperative. My results have implications for the performance of marketing cooperatives in fisheries. Chapter 4: Marketing cooperatives may have an advantage in niche markets for high-quality goods. However, product differentiation in fisheries with incomplete property rights may have unintended ecological consequences. In this chapter I explore the impact of price seasonality on the genetic composition of a salmon stock. I develop a bioeconomic model, based loosely on the Copper River Chinook fishery, and explore results from model simulations under a number of different assumptions on the biological and economic model parameters. I find that price seasonality can lead to disproportionate pressure on early-run salmon populations, reducing biodiversity in the fishery, and reducing infra-marginal rents earned in the fishery relative to a counterfactual where the genetic composition of the stock is preserved. Important factors impacting the magnitude of changes in biodiversity and fishery welfare are fleet efficiency and market conditions.