G Hendrikse

Social interactions and product quality: the value of pooling in cooperative entrepreneurial networks

Why do cooperatives often pay a pooled price, despite the free-riding incentives it entails? In this paper, we highlight that a cooperative is an enterprise owned by a network of entrepreneurial members. By taking explicitly into account the social interactions among entrepreneurial members and the impact of social ties on members’ product quality provisions, we identify the circumstances when pooling is efficient. It is shown that social interactions mitigate the free-riding effect of pooling and that the amount of members’ social interactions depends upon, and increases with, the cooperative’s pooling ratio. We show that the complete pooling policy is not only economically efficient but also socially advantageous when the context of the cooperative is conducive to frequent social interactions among members.

Communication and innovation in cooperatives

Managerial vision bias and cooperative governance

What causes firms to behave the way they do when they face different investment opportunities? We argue that both people and processes are behind the decision-making of project implementation. Member and professional CEOs of cooperatives differ regarding their managerial vision towards upstream and downstream projects. Cooperatives with member CEOs are upstream focused and it is reflected by the cascading effect of negative vision bias towards downstream projects. When downstream activities become more important, cooperatives need to replace the member CEOs with professional CEOs. However, a cooperative with a professional CEO may still be in a disadvantageous position if the member-dominated Board of Directors' negative bias towards downstream projects is too strong, which may result in an investor owned firm being the efficient governance structure.