The existence of cooperative organizations in today’s business environment, particularly in agriculture, signals their continued ability to provide value to their member owners. However, due largely to data limitations, we know very little about the monetary value of ownership held by members and how value changes across members of differing characteristics. Through a discrete choice experiment with more than 200 dairy farmers in the United States, we examine these issues explicitly for dairy marketing cooperatives that purchase their members’ milk and process it into finished dairy products. Results suggest that dairy farmers, on aggregate, are willing to accept lower per hundredweight compensation, 2.3% of the average milk price, to be cooperative members relative to selling to independent handlers. Results also suggest dairy farmers actively consider the industry wide impacts within pricing offers on preferences for other milk pricing attributes. The inclusion of demographic covariates highlights preferences important to understanding heterogeneous member interests and, thus, informing improved cooperative governance strategies and board decision making to address them.

在当今的商业环境中，特别是在农业中，合作组织的存在标志着它们继续为会员所有者提供价值的能力。但是，由于数据的限制，我们对会员持有的所有权的货币价值以及具有不同特征的会员之间的价值变化知之甚少。通过与美国200多个奶农的离散选择实验，我们为购买其成员的牛奶并将其加工成乳制品的乳制品营销合作社明确研究了这些问题。结果表明，相对于向独立经营者出售产品，奶农总体上愿意接受较低的每英担重量补偿，即平均牛奶价格的2.3％。结果还表明，奶农积极考虑价格范围内整个行业对其他牛奶定价属性偏好的影响。人口统计学协变量的加入突显了对理解异类成员利益至关重要的偏好，从而告知改进的合作治理策略和董事会决策以解决这些偏好。