Marketing margins and price transmission on the Hungarian beef market

There is a wealth of literature on farm-retail price spread for different commodities and countries. However, research on price transmission and marketing margins in the transition economies is still limited. The paper analyses two specific aspects of transition: the larger probability of asymmetric price transmission and structural changes in the case of Hungarian beef chain. The article identifies the date of structural break applying the Gregory and Hansen procedure with recursively estimated breakpoints and ADF statistics. Exogeneity tests reveal the causality runs from producer to retail prices. Homogeneity is rejected, suggesting a mark-up pricing strategy. Price transmission analysis suggests that, despite the common belief, price transmission on the Hungarian beef meat market is symmetric on both long and short run.     

Value‐based labels for fresh beef: an overview of French consumer behaviour in a BSE crises context

In the last decade, the French beef industry has been through two major health scares related to bovine spongiform encephalopathy. This paper describes and discusses changes in beef supply in France from the consumer's perspective. The authors review the initiatives implemented in each crisis and show that the immediate effects (slump in consumption), however spectacular, were not the most lasting effects. By contrast, responses from the industry and the authorities brought about a far‐reaching change in practices by requiring new instruments to be used (traceability). Yet the information conveyed by this innovation cannot readily be appropriated by consumers who are not conversant with the characteristics of beef production systems.     

Bidding for Cattle in the Texas Panhandle

Four beef-processing plants in the Texas Panhandle region procure cattle from feedlots in a form of first-price, sealed-bid auction. These auctions have features that distinguish them from standard auctions. Using transactions-level data, we estimated packer bid functions and, via simulations, compared the extant bidding environment to an alternative framework. The simulated auctions on average produced higher seller revenue, more frequent sales to the plant valuing the cattle most highly, and more switching by feedlots among competing packers. We attribute these results to packers' inconsistent bidding on the available lots of cattle and offer alternative explanations for this behavior.     

An Empirical Investigation of Consumer Concerns About Nutrition,Taste, Price and Chemical Additives During Meat Shopping

Abstract

This study revealed that one third of the consumers considered their meat being free from chemical additives as the most beneficial factor when they shopped for meat, comparing to nutritional value, taste of meat, and price of meat. About 20 percent of the consumers expressed the same concern about nutritional value, taste or price, respectively. Furthermore, consumers' demographic and socioeconomic characteristics influenced their concerns about chemical additives, nutrition, taste and price.     

Beggar-Thy-Neighbor Advertising: Theory and Application to Generic Commodity Promotion Programs

Profits from generic advertising by a producer group often come partly at the expense of producers of closely related commodities. The resulting tendency toward excessive advertising is exacerbated by check-off funding. To analyze this beggar-thy-neighbor behavior we compare a scenario where different producer groups cooperate and choose their advertising expenditures jointly to maximize the sum of profits across the groups, and a scenario where they optimize independently. In an illustrative example using 1998 data for U.S. beef and pork, the noncooperatively chosen expenditure on beef and pork advertising is more than three times the cooperative optimum.     

Effects of Label Information on Consumer Willingness-to-Pay for Food Attributes

Choice experiments (CEs) are often used to elicit consumer willingness-to-pay (WTP) for food attributes. A concern about these approaches is that food attributes provided to respondents are assumed independent of attributes not provided. We use surveys containing a series of CEs to investigate effects of adding beef steak attributes. WTP for important attributes in the CEs decrease when the number of attributes increases from three to four, while WTP increases when the number of attributes increases from four to five. Changes in WTP for attributes depend on their relationships with newly added attributes and the number of attributes presented.     

Bargaining rationale for cooperative generic advertising*

The beggar-thy-neighbour aspect of commodity advertising means that benefits to one commodity from advertising come at the expense of other commodities. The effect can be mitigated by cooperation among groups as shown by Alston, Freebairn and James (AFJ). A drawback to AFJ's analysis is that some cooperative outcomes require side payments from one producer group to another. This paper offers a bargaining solution as an alternative to cooperation in the case where cooperative side payments would be needed. We show that while bargaining without side payments is not as effective as cooperation at reducing beggar-thy-neighbour effects, it is a welfare improving alternative to non-cooperation and is likely more practical in many situations.     

基于挤出成型的3D打印牛肉糜工艺研究

以新鲜牛里脊肉为原材料,以感官分值为指标,通过考察食盐添加量、淀粉与面粉添加比和食用油脂添加量对3D打印牛肉糜品质的影响,建立正交试验优化模型,得出3D打印牛肉糜的最佳工艺为:食盐添加量为3.5 g,淀粉与面粉添加比为1:2.5,食用油脂添加量为4 g,此条件下3D打印牛肉糜的品质最佳.     

Transformation of smallholder beef cattle production in Vietnam

This research describes and analyses how smallholder crop livestock farmers in rural Ea Kar, Vietnam, were able to take advantage of the rising demand for meat in urban centres and transform cattle production from a traditional, extensive grazing system to a more intensive, stall-fed system that supplied quality meat to urban markets. The traditional grazing system produced low-quality animals that could only be sold for local consumption. Introduction of the concept of farm-grown fodder production enabled farmers to produce fatter animals, achieving higher sale prices, and reduce labour inputs by moving from grazing to stall-feeding. These benefits convinced farmers, traders and local government that smallholder cattle production could be a viable enterprise and so stimulated stakeholder interest. Within 10 years, the way that cattle were produced and marketed changed considerably. By 2010, more than 3,000 smallholders had adopted farm-grown forages and stall-feeding, and many produced high-quality beef cattle. Traders had been able to develop access to urban markets as farmers were able to produce animals that satisfied the stringent quality requirements of urban markets. In addition to the underlying driver of strong market demand for quality meat, several factors contributed to this transition: (i) a convincing innovation – the use of farm-grown fodder – that provided immediate benefits to farmers and provided a vision for local stakeholders; (ii) a participatory, systems-oriented innovation process that emphasised capacity strengthening; (iii) a value chain approach that linked farmers and local traders to markets; (iv) the formation of a loosely structured coalition of local stakeholders that facilitated and managed the innovation process; and (v) technical support over a sufficiently long time period to allow innovation processes to become sustainable.     

PDO Beef Recognition: How Can We Improve It?

There is agreement that product origin affects its quality evaluations. Though existing legislation makes use of this fact, recognition of such terms and symbols is quite low and taking advantage of origin as a differentiation source is often lost. Using a sample of Portuguese consumers and Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) beef, results confirm low level of PDO label recognition. It is not enough to communicate that a PDO label is linked to a particular region, but other aspects should be highlighted, namely, products' experience attributes. Efforts should be made to improve communication to the consumer of what a PDO label exactly stands for.