中国の農民専業合作社の組織デザイン

抄録

Farmer cooperatives have developed rapidly in China since the enactment of the Law on Professional Farmers Cooperatives in 2007. The farmer cooperative is organized in a manner that emphasizes the vertical relationship of buyers and suppliers of agricultural products, unlike the horizontal relationship among farmer cooperatives in Japan. This article tries to explain the organizational design of farmer cooperatives in China within the framework of economics of organization using the game theory. This design is characterized as follows. (1) Buyer procures agricultural products not only from the cooperative's members but also directly from the managed farms. (2) The benefit of procuring produce from cooperative members indicates not only a horizontal relationship among farmers, but also a vertical relationship between farmers and buyers. (3) Farmers never behave opportunistically, even though such behavior can earn them rewards. Characteristic (1) implies that the directly managed farm can be understood as the transfer of farmers' capabilities to the cooperative. If the farmer uses his own capability more effectively than when in a cooperative, then the cooperative can decide to procure produce from its other members, and vice versa if the opposite is true. Characteristic (2) indicates that farmers in cooperatives are disincentivized against using inputs lower as they can bargain over the transaction conditions with the buyer. However, if the buyer does not always deal with the best farmer partner, he will shift his attention to the second-best deal, and the farmer will thus have the incentive to input lower. According to characteristic (3), however, farmers curb the opportunity to reduce inputs, because buyers cooperatively resort to the trigger strategy of the game theory. Thus, China's farmer cooperatives must organize vertical relationships amongst themselves in order to reap the advantages of the abovementioned merits of vertical organizational design.