IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/isu/genres/10839.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Slaughterhouse Rules: Animal Uniformity and Regulating for Food Safety in Meat Packing

Author

Listed:
  • Hennessy, David A.

Abstract

Meat retailers express demand for a more uniform product, and technical innovations are allowing an increasingly uniform supply. Packers can promote uniformity through pre-slaughter sorting, or earlier through contracts. Emphasizing effort on the packing line, we develop a model whereby packers gain from carcass handling efficiencies when animal uniformity increases. Whether optimally regulated or not, equilibrium food safety declines with increased uniformity. A line speed regulation can increase welfare in the presence of food safety externalities by reducing the opportunity cost of allocating effort toward promoting food safety. The regulation also reduces packer demand for more uniform animals.

Suggested Citation

  • Hennessy, David A., 2003. "Slaughterhouse Rules: Animal Uniformity and Regulating for Food Safety in Meat Packing," Staff General Research Papers Archive 10839, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:isu:genres:10839
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/papers/paper_10839.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Boehlje, Michael, 1996. "Industrialization of Agriculture: What are the Implications?," Choices: The Magazine of Food, Farm, and Resource Issues, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 11(1), pages 1-4.
    2. John A. Miranowski & Bruce A. Babcock, 2004. "Genetic Information in Agricultural Productivity and Product Development," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 86(1), pages 73-87.
    3. Milgrom, Paul & Shannon, Chris, 1994. "Monotone Comparative Statics," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 62(1), pages 157-180, January.
    4. Bennett, Richard & Blaney, Ralph, 2002. "Social consensus, moral intensity and willingness to pay to address a farm animal welfare issue," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 23(4), pages 501-520, August.
    5. Robert Innes, 1999. "Self-Policing and Optimal Law Enforcement When Violator Remediation is Valuable," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 107(6), pages 1305-1325, December.
    6. Boland, Philip J. & Proschan, Frank, 1988. "Multivariate arrangement increasing functions with applications in probability and statistics," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 25(2), pages 286-298, May.
    7. Jayson L. Lusk & John A. Fox & Ted C. Schroeder & James Mintert & Mohammad Koohmaraie, 2001. "In-Store Valuation of Steak Tenderness," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 83(3), pages 539-550.
    8. Milgrom, Paul & Roberts, John, 1996. "The LeChatelier Principle," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 86(1), pages 173-179, March.
    9. Garen, John, 1988. "Compensating Wage Differentials and the Endogeneity of Job Riskiness," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 70(1), pages 9-16, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Diana Stuart & Michelle Worosz, 2012. "Risk, anti-reflexivity, and ethical neutralization in industrial food processing," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 29(3), pages 287-301, September.
    2. John Bovay, 2023. "Food safety, reputation, and regulation," Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 45(2), pages 684-704, June.
    3. Link, David J. & Almas, Lal K. & Brown, Michael S. & Lawrence, Ty E., 2011. "The Beneficial Impact of Sorting Heavy Cattle at Re-Implant," 2011 Annual Meeting, February 5-8, 2011, Corpus Christi, Texas 98732, Southern Agricultural Economics Association.
    4. Saitone, Tina L. & Aleks Schaefer, K. & Scheitrum, Daniel P., 2021. "COVID-19 morbidity and mortality in U.S. meatpacking counties," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 101(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hennessy, David A. & Zhang, Jing & Bai, Na, 2019. "Animal health inputs, endogenous risk, general infrastructure, technology adoption and industrialized animal agriculture," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 355-362.
    2. Uttiya Paul & Tarun Sabarwal, 2023. "Directional monotone comparative statics in function spaces," Economic Theory Bulletin, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 11(1), pages 153-169, April.
    3. Eddie Dekel & John K. -H. Quah & Ludvig Sinander, 2022. "Comparative statics with adjustment costs and the Le Chatelier principle," Papers 2206.00347, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2024.
    4. Julian Jamison, 2006. "The Le Chatelier Principle in lattices," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 3(2), pages 1-9.
    5. Meyer, Margaret & Strulovici, Bruno, 2013. "The Supermodular Stochastic Ordering," CEPR Discussion Papers 9486, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Alexandrov, Alexei & Bedre-Defolie, Özlem, 2017. "LeChatelier–Samuelson principle in games and pass-through of shocks," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 168(C), pages 44-54.
    7. Hennessy, David A., 1997. "The short- and long-run comparative statics of uncertainty," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 55(3), pages 347-353, September.
    8. Daron Acemoglu, 2007. "Equilibrium Bias of Technology," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 75(5), pages 1371-1409, September.
    9. Peter Arendorf Bache & Anders Laugesen, 2013. "Monotone Comparative Statics for the Industry Composition," Economics Working Papers 2013-10, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
    10. Jean‐Paul Chavas, 2006. "A Global Analysis of Constrained Behavior: The LeChatelier Principle “in the Large”," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 72(3), pages 627-644, January.
    11. George Lady & James Quirk, 2010. "The global LeChatelier Principle and multimarket equilibria," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 14(1), pages 193-201, March.
    12. Ward, Clement E. & Lusk, Jayson L. & Dutton, Jennifer M., 2008. "Implicit Value of Retail Beef Product Attributes," Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Western Agricultural Economics Association, vol. 33(3), pages 1-18.
    13. Loebbing, Jonas, 2018. "An Elementary Theory of Endogenous Technical Change and Wage Inequality," VfS Annual Conference 2018 (Freiburg, Breisgau): Digital Economy 181603, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    14. Häckner, Jonas & Herzing, Mathias, 2017. "The effectiveness of environmental inspections in oligopolistic markets," Resource and Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 83-97.
    15. Steven N. Durlauf & Ananth Seshadri, 2003. "Is assortative matching efficient?," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 21(2), pages 475-493, March.
    16. Banerjee, Asis Kumar, 2010. "A multidimensional Gini index," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 60(2), pages 87-93, September.
    17. Ghosal, Sayantan & Dalton, Patricio, 2013. "Characterizing Behavioral Decisions with Choice Data," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 107, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    18. Brunner, Christoph & Hu, Audrey & Oechssler, Jörg, 2014. "Premium auctions and risk preferences: An experimental study," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 467-484.
    19. Jewitt, Ian & Mukerji, Sujoy, 2017. "Ordering ambiguous acts," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 171(C), pages 213-267.
    20. Juan-José Ganuza & Jos Jansen, 2013. "Too Much Information Sharing? Welfare Effects of Sharing Acquired Cost Information in Oligopoly," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(4), pages 845-876, December.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:isu:genres:10839. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Curtis Balmer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deiasus.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.