Aims & Scope
Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization is a unique forum for empirical and theoretical research in industrial organization with a special focus on agricultural and food industries worldwide.
As concentration, industrialization, and globalization continue to reshape the horizontal and vertical relationships within the food supply chain, agricultural economists are revising both their views of traditional markets as well as their traditional tools of analysis. At the core of this revision is strategic interactions between principals and agents, strategic interdependence between rival firms, and strategic trade policy between competing nations, all in a setting plagued by incomplete and/or imperfect information structures. Add to that biotechnology, electronic commerce, as well as the shift in focus from raw agricultural commodities to branded products, and the conclusion is that a "new" agricultural economics is needed for an increasingly complex "new" agriculture.
JAFIO's mission is to provide a peer-reviewed, scholarly, international forum to address this new complexity with the added benefits of 1) electronic submission, 2) professional and constructive reviews by specialists in the topic area, 3) a response guaranteed in 10 weeks, 4) no galleys to proofread, and 5) instant publication upon acceptance. Through electronic submission, revision, and publication, manuscripts will no longer become obsolete because of lengthy reviews and/or waiting in the print line, as they often do in traditional paper journals.
The Journal welcomes empirical as well as theoretical articles, notes, and perspectives. It is expected that both empirical and theoretical contributions are issue-driven, informed by the idiosyncrasies of food and agricultural markets, and have practical relevance to firm strategy and/or agricultural and food industry policy.
Of particular interest are issues related to regulatory economics and competition policy, horizontal and vertical coordination, mergers and acquisitions, contracts, auctions, product differentiation, food labeling, food safety, cooperatives and strategic alliances, economics of innovation and property rights, strategic trade, market structure and environmental economics, and political economy.
The Journal also welcomes submissions addressing issues which arise in specific antitrust cases in food and agricultural industries, or issues which arise in reconciling antitrust laws with modern industrial organization theory.