This paper aims at positioning producer cooperatives within the Transaction Cost Economics theory, one of the most cited and prolific theories on management studies. To accomplish this goal, I will answer the questions what is a cooperative, which transactions producer cooperatives regulate, under which market conditions they operate, and where are the boundaries for such organizations. This pa...

The general purpose underlying this study is to investigate the factors involved in the success of poultry growers' cooperatives in the provinces of Western Azarbayjan, Ilam, Hamedan, Khuzistan and Kohgilouyeh and Boweir Ahmad. Using the cluster sampling method and the Cochran’s formula, 21 cooperatives and their members and mangers were selected from among 21 cooperatives with 1305 members. St...

The paper focuses on the strict relation between the continuous changes of the diversified tax regimes of the various types of cooperatives and the political composition of the governments succeeding each other in Italy from the after war period to the present. It emerged that the different types of cooperatives prevailing in the leftwing League of Cooperatives or in the Confederation of Italia...

The agricultural sector plays a crucial role in the Greek economy. Cooperatives are an integral part of the agricultural sector and the logistics cost impacts the pricing policy of the agricultural products, taking into consideration the value added of all trading partners along the supply chain. Many governments all over Europe pay special attention to this issue trying to make agriculture pro...

Agricultural cooperatives are often viewed as appropriate vehicles to facilitate vertical coordination with, or horizontal integration between, small farmers who would otherwise be excluded from value-adding opportunities and discerning markets. In South Africa, renewed interest in development-oriented cooperatives saw the introduction of a new Cooperatives Act in 2005, along with support measu...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the productivity change for agricultural cooperatives in Japan measured by nonparametric output-oriented Malmquist indices of total factor productivity (TFP)┻ The productivity change is decomposed into technical change and technical efficiency change┻ Linear programming techniques are used to calculate the productivity change using a panel data set for 44...

Cooperatives have been used by the inhabitants in rural areas to gain access to telecommunications. In Bolivia and Finland, for example, consumer cooperatives have been for many years the only mechanism to provide local telecommunication services to the whole country. This paper studies the effects of the Bolivian market’s structure on the development of competition as well as on universal acce...

We characterize how just-selfish workers are incompatible with long-run success in workers’ cooperatives. Emphasizing mutual monitoring as key to cooperatives’ organization design to combat “shirking” we discuss what possible mixes of behavioral types in the membership of a cooperative are compatible with sustainable success. Sustainability depends on social preferences and cooperative norms th...

Conservation of tropical biodiversity in agricultural landscapes has become more important as the area covered by natural ecosystems decreases. We analyzed the effects of local livelihoods, cooperative types, and selected biophysical variables (elevation, slope, percent shade, distance to the forest, coffee density, and coffee age) on tree biodiversity in shade coffee cooperatives of El Salvado...