This paper reports significant discrepancies in the Census’s methods and reports of online and physical retail sales in the United States. We recommend material changes in how the Census Bureau reports e-commerce and physical sales reported to it. We also recommend that the Census commission...

Russian Abstract: Развитие сетевой экономики меняет институциональное содержание экономических отношений. На смену традиционным каналам товародвижения приходят...

This article illustrates how contracts are completed ex post in practice and, in so doing, indirectly suggests what the real function of contracts may be. Our evidence comes from the contracts between automobile manufacturers and their dealers in 23 dealership networks in Spain. Franchising...

Why do retail stores agglomerate, and what happens when those patterns of agglomeration change? I describe a model of interdependent retail demand based on multi-stop shopping, and then estimate empirical interdependence by measuring how local store foot traffic responds to national chain...

The paper uses the global value chain framework to explain the transformations in production, trade and corporate strategies that altered the apparel industry over the past decades and changed the conditions for innovation and learning in the industry. The apparel industry is identified as a...

The paper explores an efficiency hypothesis regarding the contractual process between large retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour, and their suppliers. The empirical evidence presented supports the idea that large retailers play a quasi-judicial role, acting as "courts of first instance" in...

We examine how retailers discount the prices of product systems versus their constituent components. The topic is important because such systems are ubiquitous in our daily lives. In particular, many high-tech markets revolve around complex multi-component systems – e.g. a camera system...

An independent wholesaler with many different upstream suppliers is likely to be better at market coverage than if it were the subsidiary of just one supplier. But where wholesale efforts are focused on resolving externalities (by establishing and administering a directed marketing channel),...

This paper reconstructs the long-term development of retailing, including industrial, economic and social antecedents and consequences.Among other things, it includes innovation in the form of the emergence and diffusion of successive novel types of shop (including self-service), relations...

Asymmetric pricing is the phenomenon where prices rise more readily than they fall. We articulate, and provide empirical support for, a theory of asymmetric pricing in wholesale prices. In particular, we show how wholesale prices may be asymmetric in the small but symmetric in the large, when...