We show that most US food, drugstore, and mass merchandise chains charge nearly-uniform prices across stores, despite wide variation in consumer demographics and the level of competition. Estimating a model of consumer demand reveals substantial within-chain variation in price elasticities and...

In this paper we study the relationship between cultural heritage and retail store dynamics at the neighbourhood level in the Netherlands. We analyze the total number of stores, number of vacant stores and number of stores by retail sub-industry in neighbourhoods, thereby focusing on the impact...

Advances in online technologies and bandwidth availability have opened new vistas for online distribution of digital goods. But potential benefits for consumers are juxtaposed against challenges for retailers of such goods. Here we investigate one type of digital experience good - music - whose...

The main contribution of entrepreneurship theory to economics is to provide an account of market performance in disequilibrium but little empirical research has examined firm entry and exit in this context. We redress this by modelling the interrelationship between firm entry and exit in...

This paper develops an asymmetric price setting oligopoly modelof store opening and closure decisions in the UK supermarket industrywhich is estimated using a survey of consumer choices and a datasetof store characteristics. The model is used to examine the strategiclocal entry and exit...

This paper conducts the first general equilibrium analysis of the role of entry, exit and profits in industry dynamics. The benefit of our model is twofold. First, to discriminate between entrants’ role of performing the entrepreneurial function of creating disequilibrium and the conventional...

This paper analyses the extent of inter-format retail competition between supermarkets, discounters and drugstores in Germany, using data from the German market for diapers. We estimate a random coefficient logit model at the individual household level. Based on consumer substitution patterns,...

Given various recent antitrust investigations on the retail sector, we deal with uncovering demand systems substitution patterns for a particular market (diapers) to investigate the inter-format competition (supermarkets vs. discounters vs. drugstores). Using the uncovered demand system we...

Unlike most retrospective merger studies that only focus on price effects, we also estimate the impact of a merger on product variety. We use an original dataset on Dutch supermarkets to assess the effect of a merger that was conditionally approved by the Dutch Competition Authority (ACM) on...

We conduct a regional analysis of the relationship between market concentration and price dynamics in the grocery retail sector, focusing on a sample of five categories of goods belonging to the 12 COICOP aggregation and on a panel of countries that includes Germany, Spain, Finland, Italy,...