This paper analyzes the effect of competition on a supermarket firm's incentive to provide product quality. In the supermarket industry, product availability is an important measure of quality. Using U.S. consumer price index microdata to track inventory shortfalls, I find that stores facing...

At a time of a consolidation and an increasing internationalisation of the distributive trade sector, three major phenomena have been simultaneously altering the structure of euro area trade for several years now : the success of hard discounters, the emergence of private-label products, and the...

This article investigates the competition effects of supermarket food and non-food services using fluid milk as a case study. A simultaneous equation model for services and price competition is estimated with scanner data from 16 supermarket chains operating in six U.S. cities. Empirical results...

We apply the Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995) model to scanner data from Boston supermarkets augmented with consumer characteristics data in order to analyze consumer choices and price competition in a differentiated fluid milk market. Milk characteristics include price, fat content, brand name...

This article uses a discrete choice, random coefficients logit model for analyzing consumer behavior and retail price competition in the Boston fluid milk market. The problems of product dimensionality and consumer heterogeneity implied by imperfect substitution in markets with differentiated...