Does quality incentive payment improve cooperative performance?  A study of small French agricultural cooperatives.

Ibrahima Barry*, Damien Rousselière**

Date:  25 October 2019

Time: 13h00 – 14h00

Venue: CCS Seminar Room A726, Level 8, Shepstone Building Howard

College

Abstract

Small agricultural cooperatives are increasingly using differentiated payments based on the quality of their members’ products. Such cooperatives make a trade-off between the return on investment in quality and the disengagement of members from the cooperative. Based on data from the five-year survey of small French agricultural cooperatives, we analyse the effect of the incentive payment on the performance of small cooperatives. In other words, we investigate how incentive payments can reduce the problem of free riders and improve the reputation of these cooperatives. Using a quantile regression method, while controlling for the potential endogeneity of the incentive payment, we show that quality based compensation can rule out the option of defrauding for cooperative members. This remuneration has a non-linear positive effect on the performance of small cooperatives.

Biography

Ibrahima Barry holds a PhD in Applied Economics from the University of Grenoble-Alpes (Grenoble, France) and the Laboratory of Applied Economics of Grenoble (Grenoble, France) and a Master's degree in International Economics and Stakeholder Strategies, a Master's degree in Economic Engineering and Management, with a specialization in Economic Studies and Statistics.  He is currently an assistant professor in economics and strategies at the National School of Agri-food of Nantes (ONIRIS-Nantes) and a member of the Laboratory of Economics and Management of Nantes-Atlantique (LEMNA & University of Nantes).

His main research interests are industrial organization (asymmetric information markets), environmental economics and the social and cooperative economy. His doctoral thesis focused on the certification of trust goods in a theoretical and empirical approach.  In the theoretical approach, it followed the line of vertical differentiation models to analyze the role of bargaining power in the relationships between private for-profit certifiers and companies, its effects on public regulation and market inefficiency. In the empirical approach, he is interested in the role of incentives in agricultural cooperatives. Before joining the National School of Agri-food of Nantes and the Laboratory of Economics and Management of Nantes Atlantique (LEMNA), Ibrahima Barry taught for three years at the University of Grenoble-Alpes (Grenoble, France), and worked on fruitful and continuous scientific collaborations with it, the Grenoble Applied Economic Laboratory(GAEL, France), the LASER (Lombardy Advanced School of Economic Research, Italy), Agrocampus-Ouest (France), HEC Montréal (Canada) as part of the work on the transition to the circular economy, the limits of agricultural cooperative growth, and on private for-profit certifiers.