摘要：American agricultural cooperatives have a distinguished record in having improved market performance and implementing institutional reforms in many commodity industries. When market or institutional improvements are available to all producers in an industry, whether cooperative members or not, they can be considered public goods for those producers.1 The role of cooperatives in discovering and generating public goods has not been central to the research agenda. To some extent this topic has been crowded out by the more pressing task of trying to correct operational or structural inefficiencies and deficiencies of cooperatives. (Torgerson et al) In part, too, the process of how coordination opportunities are discovered and developed has not been a major subject for economic analysis and modeling.
