The purpose of this research if to enphasize the importance of price leadership by testing the existence of lead-lag price structures in broiler markets. This condition is to be correlated vith the presence of an oligopolistic market behaviour. The statistical procedure consista in deternining the direction and significance of causal relations for correlated series representing broiler prices and selecting them according vith their importance.
The research is organized io two parts: the first is an lllustration of the concept of causality (Wiener, 1956; Granger,1969), sense, with reported alternative procedures to test its presence.
The second is an application to broiler market in Italy with the purpose to detect the significative presencc of lead-lag structures by testing the bivariate correlations and Granger ordering
