Is competition really bad news for cooperatives? Some empirical evidence for Italian producers' cooperatives

Ornella W. Maietta, Vania Sena*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse the nature of the relationship between market power and technical efficiency for producers' cooperatives. More specifically we test two hypotheses: first, we evaluate the extent to which increasing market pressure may help producers' cooperatives to improve technical efficiency to guarantee positive profits; second, we test whether higher technical efficiency induces producers' cooperatives to have a larger market share. These hypotheses are tested on a sample of Italian conventional and cooperative firms for the Wine Production and Processing sector, using both frontier analysis and dynamic panel techniques. The results support the hypothesis that increasing market pressure can affect positively the cooperativeś efficiency, while gains in technical efficiency do not seem to have any impact on the cooperatives' market share. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)221-233
Number of pages13
JournalJournal of Productivity Analysis
Volume29
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2008

Keywords

  • market share
  • producers' cooperatives
  • technical efficiency

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