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| Author(s): |
Christiano França da Cunha
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade (FEA/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2011-02-04 |
| Examining board members: |
Maria Sylvia Macchione Saes;
Maria Aparecida Gouvea;
Cláudio Antonio Pinheiro Machado Filho;
Luiz Fernando de Oriani e Paulillo;
Roberta de Castro Souza Piao
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| Advisor: | Maria Sylvia Macchione Saes |
| Abstract | |
From the mid-1990s, world demand for organic products, particularly fruits and vegetables, grew significantly. Sales that were initially restricted to the alternative trading began to count on the supermarket as the main and most important marketing channel. The shift from a located and unimportant consumption to the mass consumption raises relevant theoretical and empirical issues, with respect to the structure that will govern relations between supermarkets and their suppliers. This is because such products as opposed to conventional, have high information asymmetry with respect to the desired attribute (organic) by consumers. Moreover, it is assumed that the institutional environment has an important role in determining the governance, as this may entail different transaction costs for economic agents. Based on New Institutional Economics (NIE), the objective of the thesis was to understand the criterion of choice of governance structure between supermarkets and suppliers of organic and conventional products (fresh fruits and vegetables - FFV) in two different institutional environments (Brazil and the U.S.A). Therefore, initially was presented the theoretical framework of New Institutional Economics (NIE), focusing on the approach of the theory of Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) in its two aspects, governance cost (WILLIAMSON) and measurement cost (BARZEL). From this analysis it was possible to hypothesize that the governance costs and the measurement costs would result in a different way in the transactions between producers and retailers of organic and conventional products and between the two different institutional environments - Brazil and the U.S.A. It was believed that transactions of organic products according to the theory of measurement costs would be shaped by more complex governance structure than those of conventional products, given their characteristics of credence goods. At the same time, it was expected that the complexity of the different types of production could have been relativized due to increased use of organic certification, which would reduce the measurement cost in the relationships between agents, thus leading to a convergence between these governance structures initially distinct. Regarding the countries studied, it was assumed a difference of complexity in their governance structures, and those that occurred in the U.S.A could be the less complex, mainly due to its greater consolidation in these markets studied and its major alternative marketing channels for FFV products. To test these hypotheses were conducted 128 interviews, which were analyzed with the creation of some indices and then some regressions using ordinary least squares (OLS) with robust estimates of the deviations. The results showed that the main difference was that the criteria for choosing among the governance structures differ depending on the institutional environment. In Brazil, the governance was better explained by variables related to asset specificity (governance cost), whereas in the U.S.A were the variables of measurement cost that best explained the arrangements between supermarkets and suppliers. Such differences are due to the more advanced development of standardization of organic products in the U.S.A. The main similarity was that in both countries there has been a convergence of governance structure between supermarkets and farmers, regardless of the type of production (organic or conventional). So the supermarket relates similarly to conventional and organic producers, mainly due to the advent of certification. It is possible to conclude, in the end of this work, that there are empirical evidences, demonstrated through the creation of these indices, that the institutional environment matters in the choice criteria of the governance structure to be used. (AU) | |