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Orderly Marketing in Agriculture Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2016

Howard Leathers
Howard Leathers*
Affiliation:
Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
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Abstract

This paper presents a model of economic behavior that explicates the phenomenon known as “orderly marketing,” which was a main objective of the Marketing Orders agricultural program introduced early in the New Deal. Recent analyses of marketing orders start with an implicit assumption that there is no market failure—thus, that price regulation can cause only deviations from the first-best market solution. However, historical evidence suggests that disorderly marketing might refer to a kind of market imperfection. In the model presented here, a monopsonist processor sets a price to be paid, and an aggregate quantity to be purchased. In some states of the world, some farmers are excluded from the market. In other words, nonprice rationing can occur, and changes in consumer expenditure for the final product are absorbed by the processor rather than passed along to the farmer. The classified price and pooling provisions of federal orders can lead to a Pareto improvement in welfare.

Keywords

disorderly marketingmarket orders
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Agricultural and Resource Economics Review , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , October 2007 , pp. 281 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association 

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