Abstract: Many marketing cooperatives handle several types or grades of member-supplied products. These cooperatives have to determine the returns to be alloted to each product. Helmberger, Hoos, and Nicholls have solved this problem for a cooperative with a single homogeneous product. However, their models do not extend readily to the multiple product case. This article describes how returns can he simultaneously calculated for each member-supplied product handled by a multiple product marketing cooperative. A linear programming model is first introduced to compute the returns under a set of rather restrictive assumptions. When these assumptions are relaxed, another method of deriving the values is required. Such a method--called the pooling constraint method is presented in the latter part of the article.

　　Subjects: MARKETING cooperatives; AGRICULTURAL productivity; RATE of return; MATHEMATICAL models