Assessing Bottlenecks in Vertically Organized Beef Systems

Historically, the U.S. beef industry is an industry of adversarial relationships between supply-chain lev-els, in large part due to information asymmetries and the perception of one-sided opportunistic behavior. However, many of these adversaries have moved toward vertical organization through strategic alli-ances and formal vertical arrangements in recent years (Ward and Estrada 1999). Vertical organiza-tions in the beef industry have taken various forms including cooperatives, alliances, contracting, and combinations thereof. Such systems are often an attempt to control quality characteristics in the end product delivered to the consumer and require tight coordination at each level within the chain. Incen-tives to change producer focus are built into th