PhD Defence: Anna Petruchenya
In her dissertation ‘Essays on Cooperatives: Emergence, Retained Earnings, and Market Shares’, ERIM’s Anna Petruchenya focuses on agricultural cooperatives, conceptualizing and evaluating their emergence patterns, delineating decision rights regarding their profit distribution and investigating the determinants of their market share in the European Union.
Anna Petruchenya defended her dissertation in the Senate Hall at Erasmus University Rotterdam on Thursday, March 22 at 11:30. Her supervisor was Prof. George Hendrikse and her co-supervisor was Dr Ying Zhang. Other members of the Doctoral Committee are Prof. Gabriele Jacobs (Erasmus University), Prof. Gerrit van Bruggen(Erasmus University), Dr Jos Bijman (Wageningen University).
About Anna Petruchenya
Anna Petruchenya was born in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. She studied Economics and Business Administration at American University in Bulgaria and University of Maine in the USA, and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 2011. In 2012 she received Erasmus Mundus full scholarship for two Master of Science degrees under a common theme “Economic Development and Growth”. She received her first degree from Warwick University in the UK in 2012 and her second degree from Lund University in Sweden in 2013. In 2013, she joined the Department of Organization and Personnel Management of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, as a PhD candidate. Her research is in the field of organizational economics and applied game theory. Anna presented her research at several international conferences including Conference of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE), European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE) Congress, Economics and Management of Networks Conference (EMNet), and International Cooperative Alliance Conference (ICA). Her research is under review in economics and agricultural journals.
Thesis Abstract
Cooperatives received significant attention in recent years as an alternative to investor-owned corporations. The objective of a cooperative to advance the interests of its member-owners is appealing from a societal perspective, particularly when comparing it with a profit-maximizing objective of an investor-owned firm. This thesis focuses on agricultural cooperatives, i.e. on the enterprises collectively owned by farmer-members. It advances the knowledge about a cooperative enterprise in three ways: (i) by conceptualizing and evaluating different patterns of emergence of cooperatives; (ii) by delineating an efficient allocation of decision rights regarding the profit distribution in cooperatives, from a relational contracting perspective; (iii) and by investigating the determinants of cooperative market shares in the European Union. Chapter 2 models cooperative emergence as a non-cooperative game between two farmers and an outsider. Chapter 3 formulates a non-cooperative game between the upstream party (farmers) and the downstream party (cooperative management) in a cooperative. Chapter 4 provides an empirical analysis of cooperative market shares in the European Union. Lastly, Chapter 5 suggests that, given conceptual similarities of member-owned enterprises, the findings of this thesis contribute to the understanding of the emergence, governance, and market shares of collectively owned organizations outside the agricultural sector.
Photos: Chris Gorzeman / Capital Images
