Pricing Efficiency of Marketing Channels between Production and Consumption Markets with Implications for Taiwan Milkfish

The objectives of this study are to analyze the lead-lag relationship of milkfish prices between vertically- and horizontally- related fish markets and to evaluate the performance of market integration and pricing efficiency between milkfish markets .

The results shows that the two-way lead-lag cointegrating price relationship between milkfish wholesale and retail prices. Since the fish wholesale market could not completely and quickly assimilate the retail market information, the speed of wholesale price response to retail price changes is relatively slow, inducing the low pricing efficiency . The Taipei fish wholesale market with a largest trading share appears to cause the greatest leadership impact on the price formation of milkfish in the other horizontally-related fish wholesale markets both in the long-run and short-run.