Recent theoretical models of retail competition suggest that product heterogeneity is critical to retail price and variety strategies. This article provides empirical evidence on supermarket retailers' price and variety strategies using a nested constant elasticity of substitution (NCES)...

Media and industry reports maintain that the U.S. long-distance trucking market is experiencing a shortage of drivers, and that the shortage is expected to persist well into the future. At the same time, reports of supply-chain disruption throughout U.S. industry focus on a lack of...

Bargaining between consumer-product manufacturers and their retail customers is at least nominally constrained by the prohibitions on price discrimination of the Robinson-Patman Act (RPA) of 1936. However, because the RPA is generally regarded as being inconsistent with the anti-trust principle...

Consumers purchase lower quantities of new products compared to those they have purchased in the past. We explain this observation as a result of risk-averting behavior by utility-maximizing consumers. If a new product involves a higher degree of risk that quality expectations will not be met...

Food banks are an important part of the food-retailing setting. In 2018, food banks delivered a total of 1.4 billion pounds of donated food to 51.4 million clients. Perhaps more importantly, food banks serve as an important outlet for food that would otherwise be discarded in land-fills, or...

Food banks play a critical part in the food distribution system. In this paper, we examine the impact of food bank donations on retailer markups using a unique store-level data set on donations, labor employment, sales, and capital employment. We frame our empirical model of food bank donations...

There is a chronic shortage of agricultural labor in the US. While growers are increasingly turning to guest-worker programs to meet their labor needs, few regard immigrant workers as a viable long-term solution. Further, many producers of labor-intensive agricultural commodities are considering...

Studies examining pricing outcomes in the food retail industry are complicated both by the multiproduct nature of transactions and by the presence of highly concentrated food processing and retailing industries that mediate between relatively competitive farm product markets and the consumer...

Dollar stores have become the fastest-growing retail format in the United States. However, there is considerable controversy regarding their entry, particularly into markets without grocery stores, and concerns that dollar-store entry decisions are motivated by preemptive incentives. In this...

Consumers tend to choose stores on the basis of "destination categories", or categories that tend to be relatively important attractors relative to others. Whether or not a category is truly important to attracting incremental market share, however, is a difficult empirical question, because...