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AbstractA central collective action issue in agricultural cooperatives is the free‐rider problem, a prevalent form of which arises when members systematically side‐sell to competing chain actors. Despite the plethora of studies on side‐selling's antecedents, little is known about side‐selling's actual consequences, particularly from the standpoint of cooperative members. In two studies, we aim to deliver a member‐based assessment of side‐selling's influence on critical cooperative benefits and explore possible solutions. In the first study, with survey data from 128 members of four fruit cooperatives in Greece, we show that side‐selling has a negative effect on perceived cooperative benefits, even in the presence of other collective action issues (e.g., the influence costs problem). In the same study, we posit and demonstrate that side‐selling's aversive impact on cooperative benefits can be appeased when members think that their cooperative's transparency regarding cooperative activities is high. In the second study, with interview data from 20 members, we find that different punitive (e.g., expelling members) and collaborative (e.g., fostering trust) solutions are considered effective. Accordingly, our article advances extant knowledge of an issue that strikes at the heart of cooperative activity and offers valuable insights to cooperative decision‐makers seeking to confront it.

AbstractThe Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a core policy of the European Union (EU), representing 40 per cent of the EU budget and a cornerstone of the integration process. Due to the path dependency that defined its evolution, it had always been a rather homogeneous and centralized policy. For the first time, the 2014–20 reform endowed Member States with the possibility to tailor the direct payments of the CAP along different fields of flexibility and thereby better address their national needs. This article examines these national choices in terms of the discontinuity they impose on the centralized policy model, showing that they reduced the policy inertia associated to the historical processes in place at the EU level, along a new national path dependency re‐shaping the CAP implementation. The flexibility introduced by the 2014–20 reform was particularly embraced by Member States that had been penalized by the 'one‐size‐fits‐all' historical archetype.