Industry voluntary approaches to food safety: does heterogeneity matter?
Résumé
Since the beginning of the nineties voluntary quality management systems (QMS) have emerged in the food supply chain. QMS can be assumed as voluntary approaches to food safety (Codron et ali, forthcoming). In environmental economics some empirical studies emphasize that firms entering into a voluntary program (VP) behave differently because they are heterogeneous leading to free-riding issues (Delmas and Keller, 2006). Most of theoretical researches focusing on free-riding issues within collective VP consider homogeneous firms and does not deem that free-riders could belong to the group (Dawson and Segerson, 2004). We borrow from these strands of literature to extend the analytical framework of collective voluntary approaches considering both firms’ heterogeneity and food safety specificities. First, our model aims to characterize efficient mechanism of incentives to avoid free-riding within a collective VP to food safety. We show that, when the probability of detecting free-riders is low, it is more efficient to increase the minimum level of compulsory safety effort imposed to firms by the agreement than to increase the probability of individual control faced by the members of the whole group. Second, we test econometrically our theoretical propositions. We consider thereby the safety self-monitoring agreement of fresh produce that exists on one of the most important market of fresh produce import in France.