Reducing Hold-up Risks in Ethanol Supply Chains: A Transaction Cost Perspective

Abstract

Ethanol plants sit at the intersection of three main supply chains, involving the procurement of feedstocks and the marketing of ethanol and distillers grains. A transaction cost framework assesses the extent to which uncertainty, asset specificity, and transaction frequency create incentives for opportunistic behavior by exchange partners leading to problems of hold-up. Using case study evidence from the western Canadian ethanol sector, solutions to the hold-up risks facing ethanol plants are explored. Contracting and integration feature strongly in downstream output markets. The positioning of the ethanol enterprise within a firm’s overall business model, whether as a stand-alone investment or as a forward or backward integration strategy, is an important consideration for future supply chain research in this sector.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.