Marketing Margins, Market Power, and Price Uncertainty

摘要: This paper provides a conceptual and empirical framework for analyzing marketing margins in noncompetitive food-processing industry facing output price uncertainty. The allows the decomposition of observed into components reflecting marginal cost processing industry, oligopoly/oligopsony distortions, an risk component. procedure is applied to time series spreads between wholesale pork prices farm market hogs. principal finding that, while farm/wholesale are more consistent with competitive performance now than they were fifteen years ago, component persisted throughout sample period.