PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF THE U.S. HOG SLAUGHTER INDUSTRY
| dc.creator | Bullock, J. Bruce | |
| dc.date | 2017-04-01T13:52:53Z | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-09T03:53:15Z | |
| dc.description | Conventional wisdom holds that a small and decreasing number of hog slaughter firms are using their "market power" to take advantage of U.S. hog producers. Existing studies have simply calculated industry concentration ratios and assumed/asserted that the performance of such a concentrated industry must be different from the performance of a perfectly competitive industry. These researchers have rejected without testing the hypothesis that: the observed performance of the U.S. hog slaughter industry is not different from the performance that would be generated by a perfectly competitive industry. This paper derives the theoretical relationships between hog and pork prices, and hence the farm-wholesale price spread, that would exist in a perfectly competitive slaughter hog market. These performance norms are then confronted with observed weekly price/quantity relationships over the 1991-2001 period to compare observed market performance with the ideal performance norms derived from the economic theory of a perfectly competitive market. Based on the market performance measures derived from economic theory of a perfectly competitive market, the hypothesis that the U.S. hog slaughter hog market is a perfectly competitive market cannot be rejected. There simply is not any evidence to support allegations of abuse of market power by meat packers. | |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.22004/ag.econ.26044 | |
| dc.identifier | https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/26044/files/aewp0301.pdf | |
| dc.identifier | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/26044 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/541458 | |
| dc.language | eng | |
| dc.publisher | ||
| dc.source | http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/26044 | |
| dc.title | PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF THE U.S. HOG SLAUGHTER INDUSTRY | |
| dc.type | Text |