Transaction costs and cattle marketing: The information content of seller-provided presale data at bull auctions

At sales of breeding bulls, prospective buyers have strong incentives to un dertake presale measurement activities. To reduce these transaction costs, sellers often provide information on sale bulls. We examine the information content of two measures of the expected performance of the bulls and find. that within a given herd, older, simpler measures of performance contain m ore information about prices (from buyers' perspectives) than newer. more s ophisticated measures known as expected progeny differences, or EPDs. We al so find, however, that buyers appear to pay considerable attention to annua l changes in hard-average EPD values when comparing animals from different sellers.