Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

The aim of this article is to present new models of acreage choices to describe short term production choices. Their construction combines concepts developed in the Positive Mathematical Programming and Multi-crop Econometric literatures. They consider land as an allocable fixed input and motivate crop diversification by decreasing returns to crop area and/or implicit costs generated by constraints on acreage choices and by limiting quantities of quasi-fixed factors. Attractive re-parametrization of the standard quadratic production function and different functional forms for cost function are proposed to have parameters easily interpretable and to define econometric models in a very simple way.