John M. Crespi

How Should Food Safety Certification be Financed

An analytical framework where consumers are imperfectly informed about the safety of products is used to investigate the welfare effects of a public certification system. Several certification fees under alternative structures of certification cost are analyzed. By maintaining competition among numerous sellers, voluntary certification financed by a per-unit fee is efficient (and sufficient) to signal product safety. However, mandatory certification linked with a fixed user fee may be necessary if a seller wields monopoly power. Further, certification by a single, private agency results in a distorted fee. Copyright 2001, Oxford University Press.

“Does Contain” vs. “Does Not Contain”: Does it Matter which GMO Label is Used?

An analytical framework where heterogeneous consumers are imperfectly informed about product content is used to investigate the welfare effects of a public labeling system. Although a mandatory label that reads “Does Contain” or one that reads “Does Not Contain” genetically modified organisms (GMOs) provides information for both the labeled and the unlabeled goods, there is no reason why these labels should cause the same welfare effects. This paper shows that the two labels imply different distortions due to the associated cost of labeling. It is shown that the label “Does Contain” should be used if the ratio of consumers with a strong reluctance for consuming GMO goods to indifferent consumers is high, while the label “Does Not Contain” should be used if this ratio is low. Given the findings, the authors argue that current labeling differences in various countries need not be the result of protectionist trade regulations.

Generic Advertising and Product Differentiation

This article considers whether generic advertising lowers the differentiation among competing brands of the same good. Analytical results show that if the benefits from generic advertising from increased demand are outweighed by the costs from lower product differentiation then high-quality producers will not benefit from generic promotion. Hypotheses are tested empirically under a conditional-logit approach using retail-market sales and advertising data for the U.S. prune industry. Results from this study provide evidence that generic advertising has a slight differential effect on the perceived qualities of different brands.

Robust relation between temporal discounting rates and body mass

When given the choice between

The Generic Advertising Controversy: How Did We Get Here and Where Are We Going?

100 today and

Are uniform assessments for generic advertising optimal if products are differentiated

110 in 1 week, certain people are more likely to choose the immediate, yet smaller reward. The present study examined the relations between temporal discounting rate and body mass while accounting for important demographic variables, depressive symptoms, and behavioral inhibition and approach. After having their heights and weights measured, 100 healthy adults completed the Monetary Choice Questionnaire, the Beck Depression Inventory-II, and the Behavioral Inhibition Scale/Behavioral Approach Scale. Overweight and obese participants exhibited higher temporal discounting rates than underweight and healthy weight participants. Temporal discounting rates decreased as the magnitude of the delayed reward increased, even when other variables known to impact temporal discounting rate (i.e., age, education level, and annual household income) were used as covariates. A higher body mass was strongly related to choosing a more immediate monetary reward. Additional research is needed to determine whether consideration-of-future-consequences interventions, or perhaps cognitive control interventions, could be effective in obesity intervention or prevention programs.

Market Power and the Cattle Cycle

Since the 1980s, generic advertising programs for dozens of farm commodities have been entangled in a great deal of litigation. The author looks at the history of generic advertising policies, discusses why the litigation arose when it did, and argues that the current round of litigation is simply an inevitable outgrowth of fairly recent Supreme Court rulings on commercial speech. The author further examines some of the economic studies that have been performed. The author predicts an increase in generic advertising litigation based upon the degree of collectivization in an industry and urges economists to bring the controversy into their modeling.

Generic Advertising and Product Differentiation Revisited

An analytical framework where consumers display preferences for various qualities of an agricultural commodity is used to investigate the producer welfare effects of generic advertising assessments. Depending upon the degree of differentiation present in the final goods, some producers are shown to benefit more than others from the use of a uniform, per-unit assessment on all producers. This article delineates those cases where producer assessments should be equal and where assessments should be different to insure an equitable benefit. lEconLit citations: Q130, L110r.

Neurofunctional Correlates of Ethical, Food-Related Decision-Making

The relationship between the dynamic cattle cycle and the potential for market power in cattle purchases has rarely been studied. This paper provides a conceptual framework showing how the cattle cycle and buyer market power are related. Not only does a larger cattle stock lead to a lower fed cattle price, but the cattle stocks negative effect on price is magnified by the degree of buyer market power in cattle procurement. Empirical findings support the posited theoretical relationships and help explain why previous researchers reached different conclusions regarding the extent of market power in the industry. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

Can Neural Activation in Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Predict Responsiveness to Information? An Application to Egg Production Systems and Campaign Advertising

This paper revisits the analysis of generic commodity advertising under product differentiation by Crespi and Marette. Crespi and Marette had shown that a dominant firm producing high-quality goods and facing a competitive fringe of lower quality producers could be harmed by a generic advertising campaign while the fringe was left unaffected. Under this dominant-firm model, a question remained why these producers might support a program for which they were indifferent. In this paper we show that under a duopoly model a high-quality firm may be harmed while its lower-quality rival may be made better off by a generic program, thus helping to explain why some producers might favor a program while others do not. Further, this paper dismisses the claim made by some litigants that increased branded advertising is the result of a deleterious effect of generic advertising.