Study On The Cooperators’ Free-riding Behavior In Farmers’ Cooperatives

In recent years, with the development of government’s policies and improvement of the economic environment, china farmers’ specialized cooperatives has been improved increasingly, but some inherent problems have gradually emerged, such as low organization efficiency, collective action is difficult and members’ free-riding problem. Free-riding behavior contrary to the principles of mutual aid cooperatives, undermines the collective interest, resulting in sub-optimal resource configuration state, hitchhiking thinking of reap without sowing, sit back and enjoy against to forming a good organizational culture. Furthermore, free-riding behavior will dampen the enthusiasm of cooperatives service for their members, affecting the standardized management of cooperatives, hinder the development of cooperatives. Although academics have explored factors that influence the development of cooperatives from many aspects, the existing literature lack of empirical research on members’ free-riding behavior, more lack of quantitative research on factors of members’ free-riding behavior. This article will use the research data of 10 counties, 235 members in Shaanxi Province, analyzes the influencing factors of riders’ behavior, then based on the analysis of the conclusions, propose strategies and measures to solve the free-riding problem in cooperatives, in order to provide empirical reference for solving the free riding problem of china farmers’ cooperatives.On the basis of combing research status, we discussed the main theoretical basis of this study, such as Logic of Collective Action Theory, Property Theory, Game Theory, analyzes the role of these theory on the issue of members’ free-riding behavior. Focused analyzes the mechanism of free-riding behavior, including reasons of hitchhiking, specific manifestations and its hazards. Second we uses the previously theory to do a theoretical analysis of the possible factors that influence the free-riding behavior of members. Third, combining the research data of farmers’ cooperatives in Shaanxi Province, carried out qualitative analysis and quantitative measurement of the degree of members’ free-riding behavior. Fourth, it analyzes the influencing factors of cooperative members’ free-riding behavior, and does some empirical researches with ordered Probit model, and then discussed and analyzed the regression results. Finally, we describes the main conclusions of this study, we proposed some countermeasures to solve free-riding behavior of members in farmers’ cooperatives. This paper studies the internal problems of farmer cooperatives from the perspective of members’ free-riding behavior, it has a certain novelty in terms of perspective. Currently academic research and analysis on the free-riding problem of farmers’ cooperatives are mostly left on the theoretical level, this study carried out empirical analysis.The empirical results of members’ free-riding behavior show that the significant factors are as follows: the type of product, whether the members are party member or not, education, family income, whether the members contract with the cooperatives or not, whether the membership shares or not. The two factors which are the type of product and education have a significant positive impact. Whether the members are party member or not, family income, whether the members contract with the cooperatives or not, whether the membership shares or not, these four factors have a negative impact. This paper argues that reduce the transaction costs of farmers; establish eligibility threshold into cooperatives, signed a contract with the members; improve the supervision mechanism of cooperatives; regulate the number of cooperatives members; implement selective excitation; encourage members to hold shares can ease the behavior of free-riding.