While most economic organisation literature on cooperatives has focused on changes in income rights, we study changes in the allocation of decision rights between board of directors (representing members) and managers. The traditional role of the board is to direct the activities of the managers. However, professional management increasingly makes most strategic decisions, pushing the board into a supervisory role. We present two groups of findings on changing board-management relationships. We identify three corporate governance models: traditional, management and corporation. And we present an empirical illustration showing a relationship between the choice of board model, and product portfolio and performance.

The governance of farmer cooperatives in China is addressed regarding democratic decision-making procedures, participation in decision making, member exit, and profit allocation. Empirical results from a survey of fruit and vegetable cooperatives in the Zhejiang province (China) indicate that the distribution of ownership rights, decision rights, and income rights in a farmer cooperative is quite skewed towards a small proportion of members. Several governance practices by cooperatives are not in line with the requirements specified by the Law.

Globalization, technological developments, and consumer concerns press farmers and food producers to enhance product innovation and to seek more efficient production and distribution structures. These changes in agrifood markets shift the relative importance of the investments by different chain partners. It may therefore be necessary to change the allocation of ownership of essential assets to induce agents to make those investments that generate the chain optimum. This article analyzes the impact of ownership structure on investments in a three-tier supply chain from an incomplete contracting perspective. Circumstances are determined in which a marketing cooperative is the unique first-best ownership structure. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.

This paper addresses the genesis of farmer cooperatives in China in terms of the actors. Empirical results from a multiple case study indicate that the genesis of cooperatives in China is due to entrepreneurial farmers and the government, rather than a bottom‐up, collective action process of many small farmers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Co-operatives play a major role in the agricultural and food industry. Co-operatives, by their very nature, are producer-oriented firms. As market conditions for food products have changed in recent decades, the question has been raised of whether co-operatives are still efficient organisations for carrying out transactions with agrifood products? This article addresses this question for the fresh produce industry in the Netherlands. Traditionally, fruits and vegetables were sold through auctions organised by grower-owned co-operatives. In the 1990s several auction co-operatives merged, transformed into marketing co-operatives, and vertically integrated into wholesale. In addition, growers set up many new bargaining associations and marketing co-operatives. These new co-operatives have started crop and variety-specific marketing programmes. For reasons of asymmetric information and investment-related transaction costs several of the new co-operative firms have also included the wholesale function.