THE ORGANIZATIONAL AND ECONOMIC MECHANISM OF AGRICULTURAL MECHANIZATION SERVICES: A COMPLEMENTARITY MODEL

Policy for agricultural mechanization is ordinarily designed as a problem of asset provision: how many machines to supply, on what financial terms, and to whom. Framed in this way the problem belongs to investment policy. Yet the question a farm manager actually faces is different in kind — whether to own a machine or to purchase its services, and, if the latter, how access to a shared resource is to be scheduled and how liability for it is to be allocated. That is a question of organizational design, and it is the subject of this thesis.