Cooperative stability under stochastic quality and farmer heterogeneity

Many cooperatives and related organisations use revenue pooling wherein products across multiple quality levels are commingled. Recent work showed that pooling ensures farmers against risks due to stochastic product quality and counteracts farmers' tendency to overproduce high-quality product. We extend their analysis to incorporate farmers who are heterogeneous in ability to produce high-quality products. We show that the revenue-pooling benefits of cooperation may be sufficient to cause high-quality producers to join a cooperative and pool revenues, at least partially, with lower-quality producers. We explore the producer and market characteristics conducive to the emergence of stable revenue-pooling cooperatives.