Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

We show that the internal conflicts in cooperatives can distort sales and reduce the marketing of high-quality products. The conflicts arise because modern agricultural marketing cooperatives must implement farm-level differentiation to meet requirements from high-quality market segments, e.g. consumers focusing on animal welfare. When standard producers hold the majority vote in the cooperatives, they are reluctant to promote the sales of specialty products to first best levels even though this does not affect the sales of standard products. The cooperatives will therefore tend to under-produce specialty products.

The aim is to investigate the value that the cooperative ownership form might have in agricultural cooperative firms’ relations to consumers. The empirical basis consists of interviews with 782 consumers in France and Sweden. Consumers have positive attitudes toward cooperatives while their level of knowledge is limited. Even though the concept of “cooperative” can be freely used by all cooperatives, it seems that nobody misuses its positive values. The main use could be made by well-established cooperatives, mentioning “cooperative” in conjunction with other attributes, and by local cooperatives trying to build a cooperative brand asset.

This paper challenges the general view in the literature that cooperatives underinvest, because some members will exit the cooperative before the full benefits from their investments are harvested (the horizon problem). This paper demonstrates that full equity redemption will solve the horizon problem. The majority of members will, however, bias the exit payment to their own advantage. This will lead to overinvestment. Thus, the main finding in this paper is that if there is a horizon problem, it will lead to overinvestment – not underinvestment.

Modern agricultural cooperatives need considerable amounts of capital. Theoretically the financing of cooperatives has been identified as one problem area for their future success. In part, the difficulties associated with raising capital are asserted to stem from heterogeneity among cooperative members, not the least of which is the so-called horizon problem. Here a number of potential heterogeneity dimensions are empirically investigated, in relation to financing and ownership of cooperatives. Almost all the hypotheses surrounding conflicting interests in relation to ownership and financing building on heterogeneity must be rejected. Reported answers provide no support for a horizon problem in agricultural cooperatives.

This paper examines factors that might affect performance of cooperatives and investor-owned firms (IOFs). The empirical work tests whether significant profitability differences between the two groups exist, in the case of the Greek dairy industry, over the period 1990–2001. The relevant descriptive statistics show that IOFs are more profitable, while results suggest that profitability differences between cooperatives and IOFs can be attributed mainly to the greater effectiveness of IOFs’ capital structure determinants and market share.