Sharecropping is usually explained by a trade-off between tenant's risk aversion and incentives (standard Principal-Agent approach) or between agency costs under various market imperfections, and with risk-neutral agents (transaction costs approach). This Mexican case-study illustrates a situation where contractual rationales refute the standard Principal-Agent model and where share- cropping can be analyzed as a resource pooling device, but without any major role given to moral hazard in contractual choice. In this situation, sharecropping features a partnership rather than agency relationships.
