We estimate the effects of new brands on market competition and consumer welfare in the U.S. processed cheese market. We find that an observed increase in consumer welfare was attributable mainly to an increase in the number of brands in the sample market, while the price effect, which measures...

Pricing behavior of firms in differentiated product markets has been studied intensely in recent empirical work. Despite several accounts in various industries, price leadership has remained mostly unassessed. This study analyzes price competition in the U.S. brewing industry with a focus on...

This study develops a two-stage market channel model to analyze pricing in the Boston milk market where retailers are differentiated sellers. A nonlinear model of demand and costs, including firm specific and industry cost shift variables is estimated for each of the four leading supermarkets....

This study was provided to the staff at the Federal Trade Commission in October, 1999. It expands the analysis of divestitures that was presented in an April 1999 report to the FTC (An Antitrust Economic Analysis of the Proposed Acquisition of Supermarkets General Holdings Corporation by Ahold...

In an imperfectly competitive industry, differentiated products compete with each other with price rather than quantity as the strategic variable. Several previous studies have employed a generalized Nash Bertrand model: Liang (1989), Cotterill (1994), Cotterill, Putsis and Dhar (2000), and...

This paper provides an overview of recent research on estimating competitive interaction in food product categories. In particular, the focus of this review is on research using scanner data conducted at the disaggregate (e.g., store, chain or local market) level, including empirical studies of...

This article decomposes the impact of imports on domestic price-cost margins into separate price and cost effects. Using data from 24 food-processing industries, the empirical results show that although the direct impact of imports on prices is always negative, a positive net impact on...

This report analyzes the economic impact of price fixing in the wet corn milling industry on consumers in the State of Michigan. Two of the companies who produce citric acid have pleaded guilty to fixing its price. In this report we assume that price fixing also occurred among HFCS producers....

A quantity surcharge exists when the unit cost of a given brand is higher for a large-size package than for a smaller one. This paper examines some product and household characteristics that influence observed quantity surcharging practices. Results indicate that the propensity to buy a...