An important dimension of product differentiation and segregation for specialty crops is the added handling and transaction costs incurred. Some forms of business organization may realize lower costs of providing such services, and if specialty crop production is growing relative to commodity production, these two factors may have implications for industry structure. We use data from an Iowa grain handling survey to test hypotheses developed in the non-empirical transaction-costs literature with respect to organizational and financial governance of cooperatives and private and corporate firms. Preliminary results are discussed with respect to business organizations, added costs, investments, crops, and contracting. Keywords: contracting, cooperatives, corporations, grain handling, industry structure, segregation, specialty crops, transaction costs
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Iowa State University, Department of Economics in its series Staff General Research Papers with number
11433.
Length: Date of creation: 24 Feb 2004 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:isu:genres:11433
Contact details of provider: Postal: Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070 Phone: +1 515.294.6741 Fax: +1 515.294.0221 Email: Web page: http://www.econ.iastate.edu More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Stephanie Bridges).
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: