The research, led by Julia Bello-Bravo and colleagues at Purdue University together with Yezelia Danira Cáceres Cabana of the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa, analyzed the event through the lens of transaction cost economics, information asymmetry, and market-access theory. The team deployed five non-participant observers seated at the buyers’ tables, taking handwritten field notes because organizers prohibited recording. Immediately after the event, the researchers conducted analytic debriefings, followed by thematic coding and documentary analysis of the roundtable’s official reports. The central research question was blunt: how does cutting out the middleman relocate asymmetries in bargaining power between producers and buyers?

The theoretical answer matters because disintermediation is often marketed as a welfare intervention. From a transaction cost perspective, intermediaries are not redundant actors but organizational solutions to high coordination costs in contexts of geographic dispersion, uncertainty, and limited verification capacity. They connect distant parties, warrant quality, advance cash, absorb risk, and — most fundamentally — translate between social worlds with different languages, norms, and tacit knowledge. Removing the broker does not eliminate these functions; it redistributes them to other actors or infrastructures. The question is who gains and who loses in that redistribution.

The roundtable’s most tangible success was informational. By requiring buyers to state public reference prices, the event disrupted the information monopoly traditionally held by local middlemen. One community secured a reference price of 21 to 22 soles per pound, compared with the 18.50 soles historically offered by intermediaries — a gain of roughly 15 to 25 percent. Buyers also announced plans to abandon the abusive spring-operated scales, which can skim two to three pounds per weighing, in favor of digital scales with immediate payment and formal receipts. Four communities registered for tax receipts for the first time, moving from the informal economy into formal market participation.

Yet these gains were unevenly distributed and fragile. Only three producer associations arrived with current quality certifications, and one holding Responsible Alpaca Standard certification secured a reference price of 26 soles per pound, breaking the 22 to 23.50 sole ceiling that excluded uncertified communities offering fiber of similar quality. Certification substituted the social trust of an intermediary with the technical trust of a third-party standard — but only for those who could afford it. Meanwhile, offers for identical fiber ranged from 18.50 to 22 soles, exposing how weakly evidenced quality leaves producers vulnerable to unilateral buyer discretion on price, logistics, and timing.

The grading regime itself became a site of power. Alpaca fiber value is dominated by fineness measured in microns, with baby alpaca fiber at or below 22.5 micrometers commanding a premium of roughly 15 to 20 percent. Buyers mandated that fiber be dry, clean, homogeneous, and separated by category — fleece apart from coarser braga fractions — and ruled out entire zones deemed to have poor quality. Nine of the seventeen producer associations reported not working with technical criteria at all, including micron thresholds or fiber length, even when they possessed fiber-measurement equipment, because they did not know how to use it. One buyer warned that producers should find a good classifier to avoid high variation, but also noted that the plant passes fiber through reclassification before final settlement — meaning that even after producers bear the cost of classification, the residual authority to verify and revalue the product remains with the buyer.

Standardized samples functioned as a bargaining technology, stabilizing what the product is for comparison across buyers and compressing information into an inspectable artifact. But twelve of the seventeen associations could not provide samples in the specified format, primarily because the shearing season had not yet occurred. The roundtable was held before the esquila, so negotiations were structurally limited to statements of purchase intention rather than immediate sales. Without shorn fiber, producers could not present the standardized sample kits required to prove quality — a friction one observer captured as: if there is no product, there is no price. Where standardized samples are absent or non-comparable, valuation reverts to buyer-led assessment, because buyers default to their own grading conventions and laboratory infrastructures that producers cannot replicate or audit.

Minimum-volume requirements sorted sellers into those who could viably participate and those who could not. Some buyers established minimum purchase volumes of roughly 80 to 100 quintals, explicitly excluding eight of the smaller producer communities — nearly half the event’s participants. Others opened at 60 quintals but clearly expected more, citing transport logistics, hotel, and personnel costs. The direct-contact format also exposed a credibility problem in producer aggregation: one association offered 500 quintals monthly, a figure flagged as exceeding real capacity, and monthly supply is not feasible since alpaca shearing occurs only between November and March, after which frost season begins and shearing animals significantly increases cold-related mortality risk. Another community projected 150 quintals against a current reality of 30, which buyers classified as a non-concrete future offer. Without a trusted actor consolidating and verifying supply, buyers evaluated producer estimates themselves and treated them with skepticism — a verification function intermediaries had previously absorbed.

The enforceability void emerged as the study’s most significant post-event finding. The state’s follow-up plan prescribed verification at one week, one month, and three to six months, proposing QR codes on negotiation forms to link to digital tracking systems — though it was unclear whether all alpaqueros had phones that could access them. Reports indicated that 85 percent of meetings generated interest in follow-up, with aggregate commercial expectations ranging from 6.8 to 7.5 million soles. But because the roundtable preceded shearing, the prices discussed were legally fragile purchase intentions rather than binding agreements. No consolidated national system exists to record transactions or certify quality at the point of origin, meaning reference prices are unenforceable if the buyer decides to re-grade fiber upon delivery. The state acted as facilitator of the encounter but admitted it could not balance pre-existing market dynamics once the parties left the venue.

Satisfaction data confirmed the asymmetry. Buyers rated the organization and commercial potential highly, averaging 4.5 out of 5, citing efficient market intelligence gathering and reduced search costs. Producers were more skeptical, with 30 percent rating items like clarity of rules and balance in negotiation as medium-low. Interactional asymmetries compounded the technical ones: observers documented that buyers took up to eight minutes to intervene, leaving producers only two minutes to present their products and ask questions. A gendered pattern of communicative delegation also emerged, with female producers frequently delegating explanation of their proposals to male companions or association representatives, effectively sidelining their own voices despite mastery of their craft. Symbolic hierarchies reinforced the gulf — buyers in formal urban business attire, producers in mixed rural and traditional Indigenous clothing, most often worn by women.

The study argues that improving producer outcomes requires more than direct contact. The authors recommend producer-centered transaction infrastructures, including independent sampling and testing, transparent price records, enforceable purchase-intention mechanisms, and stronger producer coalitions capable of meeting volume thresholds and securing certification. They also call for digital or face-to-face intermediation designed around Indigenous data sovereignty and the practical knowledge, values, and way of life of traditional alpaca pastoralism — a 6,000- to 7,000-year-old Indigenous tradition that has endured in one of the planet’s most unforgiving ecologies. Drawing on experienced fiber graders known as maestras to assess baby alpaca fiber, alongside more sustainable genetic diversity in alpaca breeding, could integrate traditional knowledge into these processes. The authors warn that if aggregation is conducted primarily to comply with buyer-controlled agendas without foregrounding Indigenous practices, it risks cultural disappearance as surely as outright erasure. The middleman, it turns out, was never merely a cost to be cut — but a set of functions whose redistribution determines who holds power in the market.

Subject of Research: Reconsidering the middleman: asymmetries in a direct-contact producer-buyer alpaca fiber roundtable in Peru

Article Title: Reconsidering the middleman: asymmetries in a direct-contact producer-buyer alpaca fiber roundtable in Peru

Article References: Bello-Bravo, J., Brito, L. F., Mamani Mamani, G. C., & Cáceres Cabana, Y. D. (2026). Reconsidering the middleman: asymmetries in a direct-contact producer-buyer alpaca fiber roundtable in Peru. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice, 16, Article 16455. https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.16455

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/past.2026.16455

Keywords: Reconsidering, middleman, asymmetries, direct-contact, producer-buyer, alpaca, fiber, roundtable, Peru, scientific research