In this paper we estimate the price and income elasticities for five sweet spreads using a two-stage budgeting procedure. The first stage modeled the consumer's budget decision as a Tobit model, where total sweet spread expenditures are based on income and demographic variables. The second stage, including only those households with nonzero first stage expenditures, was treated as a standard consumer allocation problem using the AIDS model. To incorporate population demographics, the AIDS model was expanded by specifying the constant term as a linear function of demographic variables. The coefficients for the prices and expenditures are highly significant and demand is elastic for all five goods. The most significant demographic effects are due to household size, and female food shopper. The theoretical restrictions of homogeneity and symmetry were tested and rejected for the complete system.

First-degree and second-degree stochastic dominance were used to separate a panel of 112 dairy farms with ten annual observations per farm into successful and less successful groups using four different performance measures. Logit regression using 16 independent variables was then used to determine important farm characteristics leading to farm success. High milk production and controlling hired labor and purchased feed expenses were important. The selective adoption of new technologies was also important. Optimal debt-asset ratios varied over the 10-year period.

Vermont agricultural cooperatives were surveyed to investigate key factors contributing to cooperative success. Most of the cooperatives were formed within the last 15 years. Financial, organizational, and operational data were collected for selected years from 1974–1984.

Average annual changes in gross sales were used to divide cooperatives into low-growth and high-growth groups. Selected variables were identified to classify individual cooperatives into low- or high-performance groups with discriminant analysis.

Management experience and adoption of multi-year plans were the two factors found to have the most significant influence on cooperative sales growth.