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Why did U.S. food retailers voluntarily pledge to go cage-free with eggs?

Xiao Dong

European Review of Agricultural Economics2025https://doi.org/10.1093/erae/jbaf007article
AJG 3ABDC A
Weight
0.44

What the paper says

I develop a model of provision competition between food retailers to examine one potential economic rationale behind voluntary cage-free egg pledges. I show that competition pushes retailers to a prisoners’ dilemma equilibrium where retailers incur fixed costs to offer both non-cage-free and cage-free eggs to steal or prevent the loss of some basket-shopping consumers. In a dynamic setting, retailers can potentially sustain an equilibrium of higher profits by collectively withholding non-cage-free eggs. I show that changing supply conditions and consumer trends could have led to such an equilibrium with pledges acting as a signal to potentially facilitate tacit coordination.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/erae/jbaf007

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@article{xiao2025,
  title        = {{Why did U.S. food retailers voluntarily pledge to go cage-free with eggs?}},
  author       = {Xiao Dong},
  journal      = {European Review of Agricultural Economics},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/erae/jbaf007},
}

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Why did U.S. food retailers voluntarily pledge to go cage-free with eggs?

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Evidence weight

0.44

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.32 × 0.4 = 0.13
M · momentum0.57 × 0.15 = 0.09
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.