The Effect of Crop Specialization on Farms' Performance: A Bayesian Non-neutral Stochastic Frontier Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Bayesian non-neutral stochastic input distance function model is used to examine whether output specialization has an impact on the economic performance of vegetable producers in Benin. Specialization is assumed to have an effect on the production frontier itself, as well as on the distance of each producer's observed data to this frontier (technical efficiency). A derivative-based measure of economies of scope is obtained by exploiting the duality between the shadow cost and the input distance functions. In this study, we also control for spatial heterogeneity of vegetable production by including a soil fertility variable in the production function at the farm level. The technology is found to exhibit no economies of scope, indicating that vegetable producers have no incentive for specialization or diversification. However, the degree of specialization has a positive effect on technical efficiency. From a policy perspective, the findings imply that policies to encourage specialization may lead to higher performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".