IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecinqu/v42y2004i1p1-13.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Standards and the Form of Agreement

Author

Listed:
  • Yoram Barzel

Abstract

Contract stipulations tend to be subject to commodity standards. Standards make it clearer what transactors have agreed upon. They also bring stipulations from different contracts under a common denominator. The lower the cost of measuring an attribute and the wider the range of its application, the higher the likelihood that the attribute will become subject to new standards. New standards are predicted to increase the role of contracts in agreements and to reduce that of long-term relations; to lower the prices of the commodities that use the standards; to increase the rate of theft of these commodities; and, by making it clearer what it is that parties exchange, to reduce the level of vertical integration. Finally, new standards propel markets toward perfect competition. (JEL D23, L14, L15, L22) Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Yoram Barzel, 2004. "Standards and the Form of Agreement," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 42(1), pages 1-13, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:42:y:2004:i:1:p:1-13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ei/cbh040
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Eric C. Edwards & Martin Fiszbein & Gary D. Libecap, 2022. "Property Rights to Land and Agricultural Organization: An Argentina–United States Comparison," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 65(S1), pages 1-33.
    2. Bougherara, Douadia & Grolleau, Gilles & Mzoughi, Naoufel, 2009. "Buy local, pollute less: What drives households to join a community supported farm?," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(5), pages 1488-1495, March.
    3. Ornella Boutry, 2010. "A New Institutional Approach of Resource Use Conflicts: The Case of Poitou-Charentes," Post-Print hal-00655829, HAL.
    4. Maze, Armelle, 2005. "Integrated Agriculture Labelling and consumer information: retailer's strategies and regulatory issues in the European context," 2005 Annual meeting, July 24-27, Providence, RI 19175, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    5. Douglas W. Allen & Yoram Barzel, 2007. "The Evolution of Criminal Law and Police," Working Papers UWEC-2008-01, University of Washington, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
    • L14 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Transactional Relationships; Contracts and Reputation
    • L15 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Information and Product Quality
    • L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:42:y:2004:i:1:p:1-13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/weaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.