Although economically very important, local-service sectors have received little attention in the extensive literature on competitive interactions. Detailed data gathering in these sectors is hard, not only because of the multitude of local players, but also because key service dimensions are...

Product-harm crises are among a firm’s worst nightmares. Since marketing investments may be instrumental to convince consumers to purchase the firm's products again, it is important to provide an adequate measurement of the effectiveness of these investments, especially after the crisis....

In most western countries, grocery retailers are faced with maturing domestic markets with a year-to-year sales growth close to zero. Moreover, most Western-European markets are characterized by a high concentration rate, with a combined market share of the top five players easily exceeding 70%....

For over forty years, Business Tendency Surveys have been collected in multiple member states of the European Union. Previous research has studied the predictive accuracy of the expectation variables included in those surveys through bivariate, within-country, Granger-causality tests, which has...

We propose that weather conditions can influence consumers’ engagement in lottery play. A longitudinal study on the extent of lottery play in Belgium shows that lottery expenditures are indeed higher after reduced exposure to sunshine, even after controlling for people’s inertia,...

The ongoing unification which takes place on the European political scene, along with recent advances in consumer mobility and communication technology, raises the question whether the European Union can be treated as a single market to fully exploit the potential synergy effects from...

How do competitors react to each other's price-promotion and advertising actions? How do these reactions influence the net sales impact we observe? We answer these questions by performing a large-scale empirical study of the short-run and long-run reactions to promotion and advertising shocks in...

The use of price promotions to stimulate brand and firm performance is increasing. We discuss how (i) the availability of longer scanner data time series, and (ii) persistence modeling, have lead to greater insights into the dynamic effects of price promotions, as one can now quantify their...

This study investigates the cyclical dependence of private-label success in four countries. The results show that private-label share behaves countercyclically. Moreover, asymmetries are present in both the extent and speed of up- and down-ward movements in private-label share over the business...

We develop a bivariate spectral Granger-causality test that can be applied at each individual frequency of the spectrum. The spectral approach to Granger causality has the distinct advantage that it allows to disentangle (potentially) di®erent Granger- causality relationships over di®erent...