Dr. Giannakas has provided a valuable resource for those interested in modeling the market behavior of heterogeneous consumers and producers. The simple, yet powerful framework is useful in understanding the potential impacts of new product introductions, labels, taxes, subsidies, and other policies.

Dinos Giannakas has been at the forefront in modeling agent heterogeneity in food markets on both the consumer and producer sides of the market and applying these methods to interesting and important problems. Now he has brought this body of work together and extended it to produce this excellent book. Readers who invest the time and energy to work through this in-depth analysis will benefit greatly from their investment.

Macroeconomic and international economic researchers, among others, have made significant strides in incorporating heterogeneous agents into their models over the past two decades. In this new and challenging text, Dinos Giannakas does an excellent job of accounting for such heterogeneity in the food marketing chain. Drawing on an extensive body of published work, Professor Giannakas provides the reader with a theoretically consistent and compelling framework for analyzing economic interactions and public policy in an important sector of the economy.

No two producers or consumers are alike and a comprehensive treatment of heterogeneous economic agents in the agrifood sector has been long overdue. This is a wonderful book for those who want to understand such diverse issues as stakeholder behavior and their strategic interactions across the agrifood supply chain, or the differential distributional effects of agricultural policies and innovation among such stakeholders. For years, Professor Giannakas has contributed leading research in modeling the market behavior of heterogeneous economic agents. His synthesis and development of a comprehensive framework offered in this book might be his finest contribution yet.