Growth in the number of food products and brands carried by grocery stores implies a preference for diversity. We examine the factors that affect the variety of food purchases across U.S. markets. Three measures of variety, based on market-level sales of both grocery categories and RTE cereal...

By nearly all indicators employed by industrial-organization economists to measure market structure, company conduct, and social performance, the ready-to-eat cereals industry ranks at the extreme end of the range of food industries. As the quintessential shared monopoly, renewed attention by...

ADM was at the center of two large global price-fixing conspiracies. Buyers were overcharged $116 to $378 million in the United States. Market structure and corporate management style facilitated these cartels. The criminal prosecutions and defendants' legal strategies were both laudatory, but...

The measurement of selling effort in the food processing industries has improved in several ways. An FTC data set on both advertising and promotional expenses is used to estimate some determinants of variations in the intensity of selling effort. They are found to be related to market sales...

From 1978 to 1987 the US food-marketing industries were in the throes of an historic merger wave that greatly eclipsed the previous three merger waves. Neoclassical economics, which assumes profit-maximization is the motive for mergers, and managerial utility are the two competing explanations...

This study identifies the determinants of coupon values at the brand level within the context of a complex marketing program. A two-equation, fixed-effects, panel-data model accounts for the bidirectional causality between brand prices and discount levels. The empirical model is fitted with data...

Using overcharge estimates for 395 cartel episodes from the 18<SUP>th</SUP> to the 21<SUP>st</SUP> century, we evaluate the impact of cartel characteristics on the size of overcharges imposed by cartels across several geographic regions and antitrust law regimes. The results of our study have important policy...</sup></sup>

A study by Newmark is one of two price-concentration studies of U.S. grocery retailing that has failed to find a positive relationship. We examined four possible sources of experimental error in this study. The most important source of error was the failure to exclude noncompeting grocery...