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ABSTRACTMember heterogeneity is often seen as a disadvantage of cooperatives. Though, a comprehensive understanding of member heterogeneity, its dimensions and impacts on member interests, organizations and their performance is still missing. The following literature review is intended to summarize the existing literature on member heterogeneity with a focus on agricultural cooperatives in order to provide further areas of research. Different dimensions of heterogeneity are identified and ways of measuring their impact on cooperative organization are proposed.

ABSTRACTStudies on cooperatives and cooperative performance have a long empirical tradition. This study provides new data on the multifaceted positions and functions of farmer cooperatives in the food supply chains in eight sectors of EU‐27. Cooperatives in this area are facing changes in competition, institutional framework and marketing conditions. What is the significance of cooperatives in the European food supply chains and which positions do they take up? Which conclusions on their handling of the changes can be derived from the development of their functions in the supply chain and which growth and marketing strategies do they pursue? By providing insights into recent literature as well as presenting and evaluating results of the EU‐project 'Support for Farmers' Cooperatives', we seek to provide answers on the questions raised above.

AbstractCorporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a central issue in the dairy industry. While it is well established that each company in a chain contributes to that chain's CSR, the role of co‐operatives as a predominant organizational form has been understudied. Due to specific characteristics of co‐operatives, one may hypothesize that these member‐based dairies put a higher value on sustainability than investor‐owned dairy firms. No previous study deals explicitly with the contents of CSR reports in the dairy industry, differentiating between co‐operative and investor‐owned dairies. We adapt an existing set of criteria to examine CSR reports from 13 German dairies and complete the picture by analyzing their websites. A comparison of formal, quality‐related, and content‐related criteria suggests that co‐operative dairies report in a higher quality and more extensively about sustainability. The results provide first insights into organizational form‐specific differences in sustainability reporting. Our findings highlight areas in which dairy companies can become more sustainable.

In this milestone report, we explain how we have developed public goods games to perform an exante assessment of novel collective contract models in the Contracts2.0 project. Workshops were conducted in Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Poland. The first data collection was completed in Germany, and an expert prediction survey was run in parallel to the public goods game with German farmers. The overall experiences from the workshops have been positive. The public goods game was met with great interest from stakeholders, albeit in all instances, there were concerns about the level of abstraction of the game. Another frequent concern was parallelism, i.e., the link between game results and real-world behaviour. We used 358 completed online responses from German farmers for an initial analysis. Farmers' behaviour in our study differed substantially from participants in the laboratory. Overall levels of cooperation among farmers were substantially higher than one would expect from previous laboratory studies. In addition, treatment effects were not in the expected direction. The only treatment that showed substantially larger contributions was to emphasize the social optimum of the game. Expert predictions were more in line with the literature from experimental laboratory studies than with the actual behaviour of farmers. Among the experts, those indicating good knowledge on the public goods game, predicted more accurately, whereas stated sector-specific knowledge (on agriculture, the common agricultural policy, or agri-environmental schemes) did not substantially improve predictions.

AbstractEconomic experiments have emerged as a powerful tool for agricultural policy evaluations. In this perspective, we argue that involving stakeholders in the design of economic experiments is critical to satisfy mandates for evidence‐based policies and encourage policymakers' usage of experimental results. To identify advantages and disadvantages of involving stakeholders when designing experiments, we synthesize observations from six experiments in Europe and North America. In these experiments, the primary advantage was the ability to learn within realistic decision environments and thus make relevant policy recommendations. Disadvantages include complicated implementation and constraints on treatment design. We compile 12 recommendations for researchers.

AbstractWe replicate Bocquého et al. (2014), who used multiple price lists to investigate the risk preferences of 107 French farmers. We collected new data from 1430 participants in 11 European farming systems. In agreement with the original study, farmers' risk preferences are best described by Cumulative Prospect Theory. Structural model estimates show that farmers in the new samples are, on average, less loss averse and more susceptible to probability distortion than in the original study. Explorative analyses indicate differences between estimation approaches, as well as heterogeneity between and within samples. We discuss challenges in replications of economic experiments with farmers across farming contexts.