Prof. dr ir Joost M.E. Pennings is Professor in Finance at Maastricht University, a Professor in Marketing at Maastricht University, The AST professor in Commodity Futures Markets at Wageningen University and Adjunct Professor in the Office for futures & Options Research, Marketing & Decision Sciences Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Pennings research deals with understanding revealed economic behavior by studying the decision-making behavior of real decision-makers (market participants, consumers, managers etc). Special attention is given to decision-making under risk and uncertainty. The understanding of revealed economic behavior is utilized to advance product development and public policy. The research is quantitative and rooted in economics, finance, management sciences, and psychology theory.

Recent research projects have investigated channel members’ contract behavior and risk shifting, the functioning of market institutions, such as auctions and futures markets, and the development of market strategies that yield the optimal risk-return profile for businesses. Pennings’ research and publications are interdisciplinary ‘by nature’, covering both economics, marketing and decision sciences.

Click here to download Prof. dr ir Joost M.E. Penning’s C.V.

Andres Trujillo-Barrera obtained a Ph.D. in agricultural and applied economics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in the department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology of the University of Idaho, and the Director of the Agricultural Commodity Risk Management Program.

Before this, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marketing and Consumer Behavior at Wageningen University. His main research interests are in the areas of commodity price risk and food marketing. Andres’ research deals with understanding the role of risk on marketing strategies in the food industry. He concentrates on three interrelated areas:

1- A better understanding of price volatility and its effect on agribusiness supply chains (marketing strategies, performance, industrial organization).

2- Evaluation of risk management instruments (futures, options, insurance, microstructure)

3- Application of new tools to measure and evaluate increased uncertainty.

In his approach, he uses a combination of marketing, economics, and finance theory with quantitative research methods.

Dr ir ing. Frans J.H.M. Verhees is Assistant Professor in the Marketing and Consumer Behaviour Group at Wageningen University. Dr Verhees’ goal is to help firms create, deliver, communicate and appropriate customer value.

The mission of agriculture and the food industry is to feed the world in a sustainable way. This is possible only when food and agribusiness offers good prospects for the brightest and most ambitious employees and entrepreneurs. However, the share of food and agribusiness in economies is constantly declining. Consequently it is hard for some parts of the food and agribusiness complex to be profitable, attract resources (including employees) and invest in sustainability.

Dr Verhees is a strong proponent of a market orientation, which holds that “the key to achieving organizational goals is being more effective than competitors in creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value to your target markets” However, appropriating value also is crucial, because it is the incentive to invest.

Frans Verhees grew-up on his parent’s farm and was educated first as an agronomist. During his education he tried to find alternatives to raise the prospects for his parent’s farm. Second he was educated as an agricultural economist, specializing in agricultural marketing. Third, he completed his PhD on ‘market oriented product innovation is small firms’ with a special interest in Dutch farmers and horticulturalists. Finally, he started as an assistant professor, teaching marketing courses at various levels (BSc, MSc, MBA and PhD) and for various audiences (Students, entrepreneurs, farmers and horticulturalists) in various countries (e.g. Netherlands, Ethiopia, Russia).

Dr Verhees’  research deals with marketing decision-making in medium sized, small and micro firms, including cooperatives, with a special interest in food and agribusiness. Special attention is given to market-oriented and entrepreneurial decision-making, including product innovation and branding.

Recent research has applied advanced theories in psychology and consumer behaviour (e.g. construal level theory) to understand strategic marketing behaviour of micro firms. Recent research projects have investigated how market orientation increases the proficiency of marketing channel functions and thus the final customers’ satisfaction.

Dr Verhees is eager to share what he has learned over the years with stakeholders in food and agribusiness, including farmers and horticultural growers. Moreover, he believes that marketing scientists firms in food and agriculture should work together to make marketing theory and methods more relevant for food and agribusiness.

Prof. Dr Michael L. Cook is the Robert D. Partridge Endowed Professor in Cooperative Leadership in the Division of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia, U.S.A and Executive Director of the Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership. His primary research examines organizational structures, strategies, and governance of patron-owned and controlled enterprise, including comparative work in more than 50 countries. Currently, Dr. Cook is coordinating development of a global network of scholars and practitioners with interest in understanding the strengths and challenges confronted by leaders of patron-owned organizations. This research and outreach work is embedded in Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership (GICL) programs where he leads a team that has conducted 400 programs and workshops to over 5000 cooperative leaders worldwide. He has authored/co-authored more than 100 scientific publications. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He also served for 12 years in senior management positions with three global enterprises, two of them cooperatives, and has occupied board positions with numerous cooperatives, subsidiaries, and associations. In May 2012, Cook was inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame at the National Press Club, Washington, DC.

Prof. dr Philip Garcia is the Thomas A. Hieronymus Distinguished Chair in Futures Markets in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  After earning an A.B. from Occidental College in economics and working three years in the Peace Corps, he received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University in agricultural economics. Excellence in research and graduate education characterizes Phil’s career. He has an exceptional record of continuous scholarly contributions, making landmark contributions to understanding agricultural commodity markets, and distinguishing himself as a graduate educator.  Phil is a highly productive researcher with over 250 publications, including 117 journal articles, 21 appearing in the AJAE.  His works have generated over 3,750 GS citations (h=37).

Phil has conducted path-breaking research on behavior and performance in commodity markets. His most lasting contributions are in two areas—rational pricing and forecast assessment, and convergence in futures markets. Phil’s research has emphasized the assessment of forward-looking pricing mechanisms and price forecasting procedures in out-of-sample frameworks. Early in his career, Phil embarked on investigating rationality in pricing and forecast evaluation in agricultural futures markets. Innovative work followed on pricing efficiency of futures markets including a 1988 AJAE article, which refined and measured rationality in commodity markets. Phil has continued to emphasize rigorous out-of-sample evaluation when assessing hedging, rationality of option pricing and variance forecasting, and commodity price forecasting.

During 2005-2010, futures contracts expired up to 35% above cash prices in U.S. grain markets, generating the largest challenge to the use of futures markets in the last 50 years. Phil and his colleagues’ non-convergence investigations culminated in a 2015 AJAE article that developed a dynamic rational expectations model of commodity storage to explain non-convergence. Non-convergence was generated by disequilibrium between the storage rate for physical grain and the exchange-established storage rate paid to holders of the delivery instrument for the futures contracts. The 2015 AJAE article serves as a benchmark in discussions of contract design and market performance. The research led to the AAEA 2014 Quality of Communication and 2016 Quality of Research Discovery Awards.

Teaching and graduate education are fundamental components of Phil’s portfolio. His courses in price analysis and research writing focus on problem solving and professional diagonal. With Carl Nelson, Phil developed and instructs an innovative and effective Ph.D. course which links research and writing. The course, which is required and establishes a common framework for students, emphasizes that effective problem solving is stimulated by regular writing and defending research arguments. Phil has shared these experiences at conferences and in a 2003 RAE article.

Phil is a remarkable advisor and mentor.  He has directed 19 M.S. theses and 28 Ph.D. dissertations. Six theses were recognized by the Department as outstanding and submitted to the AAEA competition. Koontz’s 1991 Ph.D. dissertation was awarded AAEA honorable mention. Phil also has served on 90 additional dissertation/thesis committees. Based on student research, he has coauthored 45 journal articles, and published an additional 25 articles with students on related research. Eleven of these publications, spanning 1982 to 2016, appear in the AJAE. As the Hieronymus Chair, Phil supports graduate education through assistantships, seminars, CME internships, and sponsoring conference participation. Since 2003, students have presented over 60 conference papers on commodity markets.

Prof. dr Arvid O. I. Hoffmann is a Professor of Marketing at Adelaide University Business School, Australia. Arvid continues to work with other members of the Marketing-Finance Research Lab on joint research projects. His research interests are interdisciplinary and bridge the fields of marketing and finance. In particular, he is interested in behavioral economics and finance, consumer financial decision-making, financial services marketing, household finance, and individual investor behavior. He has published on these topics in such journals as the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the International Journal of Research in Marketing, the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Behavioral Finance, Theory and Decision, Corporate Communications, and the International Journal of Bank Marketing.

Prof. dr Constantine Iliopoulos is Director of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute (AGR.E.R.I.) and Adjunct Professor at the Agricultural University of Athens, both in Athens, Greece. His research program focuses on agribusiness economics and collective entrepreneurship—particularly the organizational and capital-acquisition aspects of innovative agribusiness cooperatives, and rural development—with attention to both theoretical and policy concerns. The economics of cooperative legislation and policy, the formation requirements for agricultural bargaining cooperatives, and innovative solutions to ownership and governance problems of agricultural cooperatives have been in the center of his research during the last years. Constantine’s theoretical tools include approaches such as organizational, new institutional and evolutionary economics. His empirical research includes numerous survey data collection and analyses at the farm, cooperative and industry levels, case study and focus groups research, as well as structural equation modelling. His current research and teaching focus on social innovation, cooperatives and trust-generating incentive mechanisms in food production and natural resource management.

Dr. ir Nikos Kalogeras is an Assistant Professor of Marketing & Consumer Behaviour at Wageningen University. He also holds the position of Research Coordinator (Dept. of Business Economics & Management) at the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania (MAICh) – International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies (CIHEAM, France). Moreover, he is a visiting professor at the Athens University of Economics & Business, Democritus University of Thrace, and MAICh and he is affiliated with the Financial Engineering Laboratory at the Technical University of Crete and the Laboratory of Tourism Research and Studies (ETEM) at the Aegean University in Greece. Nikos’ research interests are interdisciplinary and bridge the fields of marketing and finance. In particular, he is interested in behavioral economics, strategic marketing-management, cooperative entrepreneurship, consumer behavior, financial services marketing, sustainable and regional development, marketing-finance engineering, and tourism marketing. He has published on these topics in such journals and book series as the Journal of Service Management, European Journal of Operational Research, Theory & Decision, Agribusiness: An International Journal, International Journal of Food & Agribusiness Marketing, Supply Chain & Finance, Journal of Food Products Marketing, Journal of Food Engineering, Food & Chemical Toxicology. Next to his academic work, Dr. Kalogeras served as an expert for several international policy organizations and governmental agencies such as the CIHEAM in France, National Cooperative Council (NCR) in the Netherlands, United States Agency for International Development (USAID in the USA), European Parliament, European Commission (EC), and UNESCO. Finally, he worked as a senior researcher and project leader on various applied research projects funded by leading product companies (e.g., DSM, Product & Gamble, Unilever) and globally known financial institutions (e.g., Rabobank, Deutsche Bank, and APG).

Prof. Dr. Mindy L. Mallory is associate professor and Clearing Corporation Foundation Chair in Food and Agricultural Marketing in the Agricultural Economics department at Purdue University where she teaches courses and researches topics related to commodity markets.

Prior to coming to Purdue University, she was an assistant and associate professor in the department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois. Her research covers forecasting, price discovery, the nexus between commodity and energy markets, liquidity costs, and others issues related to futures market microstructure.

Prof. dr Peter D. Goldsmith is an Professor in Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as Interim Director of Food & Agribusiness Management (FAM).

Prof. dr Goldsmith’s research interest is agro-industrial marketing. Specific topics include: adaptation processes and strategy, biotechnology, food safety, the Brazilian and Argentinean agribusiness complex, and large-scale livestock and grain firms.

Current Research Projects

1) The Economics of Safrinha Production and Post-Harvest Loss in Brazil

2) The Impact of Livestock on Poverty Reduction: Zambia

3) Agglomeration Theory and Soybean Industrial Clusters

4) The Problem of Persistence for Institutional Agribusiness Investors

5) Measuring Value Creation Along the Food and Agribusiness Value Chain

Dr. Jason Franken is an Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics in the School of Agriculture at Western Illinois University, where he received the College of Business and Technology’s faculty award for Excellence in Scholarly, Creative, Performative, Professional Activities in 2016. His current teaching duties include undergraduate courses in agribusiness management, marketing, and futures and options trading. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Jason co-advises the Agribusiness Club at WIU. His research is interdisciplinary by nature, drawing from economic, marketing, and decision sciences to understand the organization of supply channels for managing risk and adding value. Jason received his BS and MS from the University of Missouri and his PhD from the University of Illinois.

Dr. ir Yann de Mey is Assistant Professor in Business Economics at the Department of Social Sciences of Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands.

Dr. de Mey’s research domains are agricultural risk analysis, farm management and decision analysis. Throughout his work, decision-making under risk and uncertainty has played a central role focussing on the interrelationship between various sources of risk, optimal risk management portfolio selection by farm households and exploring the hidden side of farm risk behaviour. Methodologically speaking, the research is rooted in panel data econometrics and stochastic simulation.

His current research focus lies in analysing the role of digitization and data analytics in supporting agricultural risk analysis and farm management. He is particularly interested in working on the following issues:

1. The role digitization can play in agricultural risk analysis, characterizing and quantifying various sources of risk and their interdependency
2. The contribution of the digitization of agriculture to better farm management, with a particular focus on decision making under risk
3. Big data analytical tools to be leveraged for large scale and big data-oriented agricultural business economics research

Click here for Dr. de Mey’s academic publication list and follow him on Twitter as @YanndeMey.

Prof. dr Jens-Peter Loy is Full Professor for Market Analysis in the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Kiel in Germany.

Click here for Prof. dr Loy’s academic cv.

Dr. George Baourakis is the Director of the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania (CIHEAM-MAICh) since June 2012, and the Studies and Research Coordinator of the Business Economics and Management Department of MAICh since 1989: https://www.iamc.ciheam.org/ He has more than two decades’ experience in the management and coordination of educational and research activities, including coordination of the MSc Programme of MAICh-CIHEAM, organization of international seminars and training courses both at MAICh and in many other Mediterranean countries, and scientific, economic and administrative management of research projects. He has co-ordinated and participated in a large number of EU (FP 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th, INTERREG I, II and III-Archimed, MED, Tempus, Phare, Life, Lifelong Learning, Leonardo Da Vinci, European Social Fund/Operational Sectoral Programme), international and national-regional research projects (Ministry of Rural Development and Food, Ministry of Economy, etc).

Dr Baourakis is an Affiliate Professor in Marketing and Supply Chain Management, at the Centre of Entrepreneurship, Nyenrode University, The Netherlands Business School and at Maastricht University. He has been appointed as Distinguished Research Fellow in Food Marketing-Management at several universities. He has published numerous papers in internationally refereed scientific journals, presented extensively at international conferences, and authored/co-authored several scientific and academic books and special issues which have been distributed by renowned publishing houses. He is the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Food and Beverage Manufacturing and Business Models. Moreover, he is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Food Products Marketing (Taylor & Francis), the Journal of Food Economics (Taylor & Francis), the International Journal of Corporate Finance and Accounting (IGI Global), the Journal of Computational Optimization in Economics and Finance (Nova Publishers), while he is Associate editor of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Economics (Springer) and co-editor of the Book Series Cooperative Management (Springer International Publishing AG). He is also acting as a Referee in various journals concerned with food marketing, management and finance.

Dr. Theo Benos received his Ph.D. from Wageningen University in 2019.  Dr. Benos is a freelance agribusiness & food marketing consultant as well as a researcher at Wageningen University. He is also a co-founder & co-manager of the Greek agribusiness portal www.gyri.gr, while an external partner of the CREA Institute in Rome (Research Centre for Agricultural Policies and Bio‐economy). Theo is an expert in CAP implementation projects and a former Marketing Lecturer at Maastricht University. As a researcher, he specializes in co-operatives, agribusiness & food marketing, and agricultural policy, with a track record of influential publications (e.g., “European Journal of Marketing”, “Agribusiness”, “Journal of Common Market Studies”), numerous presentations at scientific conferences (e.g., “EAAE”, “ICA”), and various consulting projects for food companies.

Dr. Guillaume Bagnarosa is an associate professor of finance at the Rennes School of Business (France), where he is the director of the Area of Excellence in Agribusiness. He is a research affiliate at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRAe) and a member of the joint research program in Agri-Finance between RSB, Agrocampus Ouest and the INRAe. He worked for 15 years  in  the research departments of several hedge funds and investment banks both in Paris and London. His research covers commodity market price modelling and risk management as well as econometrics and financial mathematics. Guillaume is a research associate of  the  statistics  department  of  UCL  in  London and has received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Dr. Alexandre Gohin is a Director of Research at INRAE, the new French institute working at the crossroads between agriculture, food, and the environment. He is working in the department of social sciences, in the SMART LERECO joint unit with AgroCampus Ouest. He is a member of the joint research program in Agri-Finance between Rennes School of Business, Agrocampus Ouest and the INRAE. He received his PhD from the University of Paris 1, first specialized in general equilibrium models with application to agricultural and international trade policies, more recently environmental policies. He now develops both macro and microeconomic researches developed to analyse the risks affecting the farm and food sectors. Over the last 20 years, he participated to many research projects funded by regional, national and international organisations and supervised many master/PhD students.

Dr. Ronald Heijmans received his PhD from the University of Groningen in the field of Economics. His thesis was on large value payment systems.   Prior to that he obtained an MSc in astrophysics from Leiden University. He worked for DNB over 14 years in the Payments and Financial Market Infrastructure Division as researcher and policy advisor. In 2018 and 2019 he was also connected to Payments Canada as a research advisor. In June 2020 he joined the data science hub within DNB as a senior data scientist. Ronald has contributed to the literature of payment systems and financial market infrastructure on topics like machine learning, artificial intelligence, risk indicators, bank’s liquidity, network topology and game theory. In this capacity he is associate editor of the Journal of financial market infrastructures. Lately, the main focus of his research is related to artificial intelligence and big data analysis in the field of financial market infrastructures. He also teaches “R for data science” for Tridata. Besides, he gives guest lectures at universities.

Dr.ir. Tarek AlSkaif is an Assistant Professor of Energy Informatics with the Information Technology (INF) group at Wageningen University. He holds a Ph.D. from the Statistical Analysis of Networks and Systems research group at the Technical University of Catalunya (UPC, Barcelona-Tech). His research interests span various challenges in smart grids, including the design of smart and user-centric energy systems, electricity markets, solar energy, and the integration of distributed energy resources (EV and storage). He emphasizes mathematical modelling, optimization, and artificial intelligence in his work. Dr. AlSkaif is an IEEE senior member and serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Dr. AlSkaif is a Board Member of the Netherlands Institute for Research on ICT (4TU.NIRICT). He is leading the energy markets research in project HighLO (High Energy Physics Tools in Limit Order Book Analysis) in collaboration with CERN and the national energy regulator ACM.

Dr. Marjolein Verhulst is a researcher at the Marketing and Consumer Behaviour Group at Wageningen University. Marjolein studied Business Administration (B.Sc.) at the Radboud University Nijmegen and Marketing-Finance (M.Sc.) at  Maastricht University. Her main research interests are in the areas of exchange-traded risk management instruments (derivatives), marketing and behavioral finance. In the past, Marjolein was involved in the development of vegetable futures contracts and data analysis.