Quality Choice, Competition and Vertical Relationship in a Market of Protected Designation of Origin

Zohra Mechemache and Jianyu Yu ()

No 103607, 2011 Annual Meeting, July 24-26, 2011, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) is a public label that is used by the European Union as a tool to sustain the competitiveness and the profitability of agricultural sector and in particular to maintain rural activity in less favored areas. However, in PDO supply chain, many farmers deal with relatively few processing firms. In this framework, it is not clear that producers under such protective policy would have incentive to adopt costly measures to improve their product qualities and accept the restrictions on their production practices. Taking into account the vertical structure of the PDO supply chain, we develop a model of oligopoly and oligopsony competition to investigate the conditions under which PDO producers set high quality requirements on the production of the agricultural input. We find that even if raising quality does not imply additional willingness to pay from consumers, there is still scope for the PDO producers to choose a higher level of quality than the minimum quality standard. The outcome depends on the demand and technology characteristics, which will affect the oligopoly and oligopsony power of processors. In particular, farmers will prefer a higher quality standard than processors when the demand for PDO market is inelastic and the increase in quality generates an additional reduction in farmers’ return to scale.

Keywords: Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/103607/files/BY_AAEA_PDO2011.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Quality Choice, Competition and Vertical Relationship in a Market of Protected Designation of Origin (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea11:103607

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.103607

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2011 Annual Meeting, July 24-26, 2011, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().