I didn't come up with the idea, I saw it in action in a mining context.

Besides, how you can be sure it does or doesn't happen? The world is large and complicated; and basic research gets nearly no press and is very hard to statistically quantify. Where would you look for proof in the positive or negative?

Fonterra, New Zealand's largest company runs along these lines. It's a dairy company, so basically gets milk from dairy farmers and puts it on the market. It is a co-op owned by those farmers.

My guess is the mining companies do this more for liability then shared cost. I wonder what the churn is in this group of companies?

An example in semiconductors would be Sematech.