Asymmetric Information, Transaction Costs, and Farmers Decision To Participate In Tobacco Voor-Oogst Kasturi Contract Farming

Abstract

Contracts participation between tobacco farmers and traders is still low even benefit of contract is huge. This is related to factors that affect to the contract, demographics, farm characteristic, and other related factors.  Contracts that initially became a tool to prevent market failure because it regulates how economic actors act against other, turns out to cause transaction costs as a result of asymmetric information that makes the contract does not function ideally. Therefore, this study attempts to explain asymmetry information during the transfer product and the potential transaction costs incurred using the New Institutional Economy approach. Beside that, this study also attemps to explain factors that underlie farmers decision making partnership, that were analized by using the analyst logistic regression.Respondents in this study were 100 respondents, 50 tobacco contract farmers, and 50 independent farmers from December 2018 through January 2019. The results showed that asymmetric information caused adverse selection and moral hazard, as many as 30% farmers had sold products to other parties and 8% of farmers had used pesticides that prohibited by traders. Contracts that are not ideal due to asymmetric information must be re-enforced by using additional costs called transaction costs which are divided into three typess, namely search and information costs, cost to design, negotiate and conclude and the monitor and contract enforcement costs. Monitoring costs have the potential to absorb the largest portion compared to other types of transaction costs. The greater the asymmetric information generated, the greater the transaction costs incurred. Then the factors that significantly influence the decision making of tobacco farmers to partnership are long time farming experience, land size, risk aversion level, certainty of price and source of capital.