Efficient information exchanges between sellers and buyers are essential if prices are to act as a signal for resource allocation in an economy. In the case of seed and planting materials, information on quality traits are often difficult for consumers (farmers) to obtain prior to purchase,...

Using daily data from 182 spatially separated U.S. cash markets for the years 2006-2011, I investigate price discovery for corn. With a large number of cash markets available, I take into account explicitly the issue of market selection, which has been neglected in previous work. I find that...

This study investigates dynamic relationships among U.S. corn cash prices for the years 2006-2011. With daily data from 182 spatially separated markets spreading across 7 states, Iowa (IA), Illinois (IL), Indiana (IN), Ohio (OH), Minnesota (MN), Nebraska (NE), and Kansas (KS), we apply an error...

Not only does information about food recalls play a vital role in changing the demand for implicated food products, but it also impacts the demand for close substitutes. The study aims to identify the structural change in demand for cookie dough due to the 2009 cookie dough recall of Brand1, one...

In this study, we explore how the acquisition of Smithfield, the world’s larger pork producer, by a Chinese firm Shuanghui, on Chinese consumers’ WTP to meat product using experimental auctions. We conducted two sets of experiments, one when the acquisition was still pending approval and the...

Farm management skills can affect farm managers' performance. In this article, farm management performance is analyzed based on yearly Illinois Farm Business Farm Management (FBFM) panel data across 6,760 farms from 1996 through 2011. Two out-of-sample measures of skill are used to analyze the...

This paper examines the impact of technical efficiency on the optimal exit timing of farms in a stochastic dynamic framework. Starting from a standard real options approach, we incorporate technical efficiency via a production function and derive an optimal price trigger at which farms...

The fresh-cut sector is constantly evolving and innovating in order to enhance quality and safety of products, which attributes are generally valued by consumers. Quality and safety are multifaceted attributes because they arise from a wide set of methods/technologies, therefore the knowledge...

This study determines the factors leading to adoption of split-sex and phase feeding by U.S. hog producers and consequently the impact of adoption on operation’s input cost performance. A sample selection model is employed to account for unobservable variables possibly being correlated with...