Market Power and Risk of Price Uncertainty (A Case Study of Date Market)

Date is as one of the important items of the agricultural production in Iran as Iran's share of global production was 14.1% in 2012 and rank of production increased to second in the world too. In recent years, price uncertainty in date market has increased due to changes in government policies on date prices pattern, from a guaranteed buying pattern to negotiated price pattern. According to the importance of this industry in the country and issues that are always in marketing and market making of agricultural products in developing countries, This paper seeks to measure marketing margins in the industry due to the product's market power and price volatility, and to achieve this goal, the main idea of this paper based on the study Brorsen et al (11). This paper provides a conceptual and empirical framework for analyzing marketing margins in a date market facing output price uncertainty in Iran. Present study evaluated marketing margins into component reflecting the marginal cost of the processing industry, oligopoly price distortions, and an output risk component. The empirical finding is that, while marketing margin is about 33%, the coefficient for oligopoly is more than the coefficient for oligopsony. In the other words, there is an asymmetric monopoly power among buyers and sellers, Also the estimated coefficient for price risk based on exponential GARCH approach indicates, this factor would affect the marketing margin about 7 percent, if all other factors remain constant.