This paper focuses on contract provisions and product quality in a quality differentiated product system: the California winegrape industry. Contracts provide a vehicle to encourage and monitor cultural practices, provide bonuses or penalties for product attributes, and facilitate product control. We explicitly identify hypotheses regarding the nature of information and the change in this relationship that seem to be implicit in the industrialization literature. Analyzing data from a survey of California winegrape growers, it is demonstrated that these implicit hypotheses often do not hold.
See PDF article here: Contracts, Quality, and Industrialization in Agriculture: Hypotheses and Empirical Analysis of the California Winegrape Industry by Rachael E. Goodhue, Dale M. Heien, Hyunok Lee and Daniel A. Sumner, revised December 25, 2000.