IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ajagec/v90y2008i1p15-27.html

Traceability, Liability, and Incentives for Food Safety and Quality

Author

Listed:
  • Sébastien Pouliot
  • Daniel A. Sumner

Abstract

Recent food scares such as the discoveries of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and E. coli-contaminated spinach have heightened interest in food traceability. Here, we show how exogenous increases in food traceability create incentives for farms and marketing firms to supply safer food by increasing liability costs. We model a stylized marketing chain composed of farms, marketers, and consumers. Unsafe food for consumers can be caused by either marketers or farms. We show that food safety declines with the number of farms and marketers and imperfect traceability from consumers to marketers dampens liability incentives to supply safer food by farms. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Sébastien Pouliot & Daniel A. Sumner, 2008. "Traceability, Liability, and Incentives for Food Safety and Quality," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 90(1), pages 15-27.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:90:y:2008:i:1:p:15-27
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1467-8276.2007.01061.x
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:90:y:2008:i:1:p:15-27. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaeaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.