Welcome to Cooperatives: A Set of Studies about On-going Issues with Consumers and Organizations

This dissertation consists of two parts: the consumer and the organization side of cooperatives. For the consumer side, I focused on the consumers of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). An analysis of customers’ preferences towards locally-grown food sources during the COVID-19 pandemic was conducted through an online survey. A total of804 survey respondents answered questions regarding their food shopping preferences to see if the current increased interest of CSAs will last and identify customers’ shopping behavior changes during the pandemic. I estimated the Willingness to Pay for locally-grown food sources and a Panel-data Mixed logit choice model to see which factors affect customers' choices. Results showed that CSAs have the lowest WTP among other sources, and respondents valued the general weaknesses more than the advantages of CSAs when choosing where to purchase locally-grown food. Second, I analyzed the relationship between the boards and managers to ascertain the potential impact those relationships might have on the Principal-Agent (PA) problem. Existing studies for the PA problem are mostly focused on for investor-oriented firms (IOFs), thus implementing them may cause imprecise results when explaining the complexity of cooperative culture. Consequently, I built a conceptual model for the PA problem between managers and the boards in cooperatives, and applied them to cooperative managers’ in Texas. As a result, heterogeneous behavioral characteristics were found from agricultural/non-agricultural and user/non-user members in the conceptual model. Lastly, I suggested considering the board of directors factors into the conceptual model in order to fully explain the PA problem relationship between managers and the boards in cooperatives.