A ‘SATISFICING’ MODEL OF CAP DECISION-MAKING

Agricultural policy decisions in the European Community tend to be treated as exogenous influences on agricultural markets, on the grounds that political factors assume a dominant (yet indeterminant) role in the decision-making process of the Common Agricultural Policy. This paper attempts to endogenise the annual price-fixing process in a behavioural model based on the assumption that politically motivated decision-makers seek to achieve ‘satisficing’ rather than optimal solutions to the conflicting problems of farm income support and budgetary expenditure.