Price premiums, payment delays, and default risk: understanding developing country farmers’ decisions to market through a cooperative or a private trader
研究了发展中国家小农户在合作社（承诺价格溢价但延迟支付且有违约风险）与私人贸易商（现金现货但可能行使市场势力）之间的销售选择，发现支付及时性和违约风险的改善能显著提升合作社的市场份额和生存能力。
Abstract Smallholder farmers in developing countries face a competitive disadvantage in modern agricultural supply chains. Joint marketing through cooperatives is a potential tool to mitigate these disadvantages; yet cooperatives’ success in these settings is uneven at best. We develop an analytical model to study a farmer's choice of selling to a private trader who pays cash on delivery but may exercise market power or a cooperative that promises a price premium but delays payment and carries a concomitant risk of default. In the presence of impatient and risk‐averse farmers, we show that these factors can severely limit smallholder patronage of a cooperative, despite a promised price premium. We then construct and parameterize a simulation model to fit a profile of heterogeneous farmers within a prototype developing‐country village, and study the optimal decisions of farmers regarding marketing through a cooperative versus a private trader. Results suggest that modest improvements in either timeliness of payment or probability of default can induce a substantial increase in a cooperative's market share and economic viability. Extending the simulation analysis to a dynamic setting shows how implementing reasonable policies to improve a cooperative's payment timeliness and default probability can markedly improve its growth trajectory.