Pass or Fail: Economic Incentives to Reduce Salmonella Contamination in Ground Beef Sold to the National School Lunch Program
研究了碎牛肉生产商在向全国学校午餐计划供货时，如何利用自身生产率和沙门氏菌检测优势参与投标，并发现零容忍标准显著提高了食品安全达标率。
Abstract Ground beef sold to the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) for distribution to the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) must meet stringent food‐safety standards, specifically, a zero‐tolerance standard for Salmonella . We use a unique data set containing information on Salmonella levels in order to examine the sequential decisions of ground‐beef plants to become registered as AMS suppliers and then bid on contracts to supply the NSLP from 2006 to 2012. We find that plants exploit their competitive advantages in relatively high productivity and strong performance on Salmonella tests when choosing to bid on contracts in a given year. Furthermore, the incentives generated by the zero‐tolerance standard for Salmonella are highly effective: ground beef supplied to the NSLP is 21–22 percentage points more likely to meet a zero‐tolerance standard for Salmonella than ground beef tested as part of typical meat‐plant inspections.