Executive Summary The lack of market information represents a significant impediment to market access especially for smallholder poor farmers: it substantially increases transaction costs and reduces market efficiency. For any one crop, the marketing chain consists of multiple middlemen, each taking a margin at every stage of the chain, and price variations in space and time are often large and...

Very early in the evolution of e-commerce, predictions were made that a significant degree of disintermediation would occur, i.e., that middlemen would be eliminated from the value chain through the use of the Internet. The reasoning was as follows. The economic benefit of middlemen, or intermediaries, is that they reduce transaction costs for functions that are outside the firm (Coase, 1937). ...

Janet Landa provides an impressive historical tour of the development of her theory of homogeneous middlemen groups (HMGs), and how she arrived at the group selection approach. Despite her claim that the case studies she presents provide evidence for group selection in human societies, we argue that such a conclusion is premature.We suggest that an evolutionary explanation of HGMswill be streng...

We consider a model of decentralized bargaining among three parties. Parties meet one-on-one after being randomly matched, and can sell or buy votes to one another. The party with a majority of the votes can decide to implement its preferred policy or extend negotiations to capture additional rents. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an equilibrium in which a pa...

The tendency of acquiring information systems and other high technology services from international suppliers continues at unprecedented levels. The primary motivation for the offshore sourcing of technology and services continues to be labor cost arbitrage, and secondly, access to higher levels of expertise. Yet paradoxically, large gaps in technical proficiency, cultural values, and communica...

This paper studies middlemen—or “critical nodes”—that intermediate flows in a directed network. The contestability of a node is introduced as a network topological concept of competitiveness meaning that an intermediary’s role in the brokering of flows in the network can be substituted by a group of other nodes. We establish the equivalence of uncontested intermediaries and middlemen. The notio...

Maesan Village is located in Mojo District, Kediri Regency, East Java Province. In this village, there are farmer groups who have major problems, including case pollution due to the use of tin waste, secondly it still dependent on middlemen provide low interest prices so they need a way release dependence middlemen, third about financial records. With study method Kembang Karomah group, communi...