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NDERLYING the recent impetus provided by the federal government to agricultural marketing research appears to be the implicit assumption that alterations in the marketing structure-the methods or procedures by which the products of the farm are made available to consumers-can improve farm income. Title II, the "Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946," of Public Law 733 (79th Congress-chapter 966-2d Session), states in Sec. 202: "The Congress hereby declares that a sound, efficient and privately operated system for distributing and marketing agricultural products is essential to a prosperous agriculture and is indispensable to the maintenance of full employment and to the welfare, prosperity and health of the nation ... it is the intent of Congress to provide for (1) continuous research to improve the marketing, handling, storage, processing, transportation and distribution of agricultural products." An estimate of what Congress expects from this law may be obtained from an examination of Sec. 203. "The Secretary of Agriculture is directed and authorized

IKE much of the current research in the marketing of agricultural products, the "Chicago project" is concerned with marketing efficiency. To be more specific, we are attempting to: (1) draw the outlines of a concept of marketing efficiency which is consistent with (and hence derived from) widely agreed objectives of economic policy; (2) apply this concept to a determination of the extent to which too few or too many resources are employed in producing marketing services; (3) identify the factors which tend to reduce the efficiency of the marketing system below its maximum (with given preferences and available resources and technology), noting particularly the influences which might be altered by public policy; and (4) describe (largely by means of statistical estimation) some of the relationships which are relevant for measuring efficiency and the importance of certain forces which influence it. In approaching this problem we hope to apply to marketing research those parts of economic theory which have proven useful in other areas of economic research. We also hope that, from our findings, hypotheses might be developed which may prove useful in research relating to sectors of the economy other than marketing. In the following pages I shall try to make clear some of the basic assumptions underlying our analysis and describe in more detail parts of the project and some of the hypotheses which are being tested.

Professor W. O. Jones of the Food Research Institute, Stanford University, has kindly pointed out some computational errors which occurred in the article "Production Functions Derived from Farm Records," published in This Journal, August 1944, pp. 566 ff.