on how the local entry of a hard-discounter affects the market performance of traditionalʺ supermarkets. It is argued … competitive impact of hard-discounters at a more detailed (category-by-category) level, and examines whether an economy private … label as is employed by many supermarkets in response to hard-discounters can indeed be effective in reducing this impact …

The paper formalizes the intuition that brands are consumed for image reasons and that advertising creates a brand …'s image. The key idea is that advertising informs the public of brand names and creates the possibility of conspicuous … consumption by rendering brands a signalling device. In a price competition framework, we show that advertising increases …