The aim of this paper is to report the findings of the study of the routes and the distance traveled by spices from the farming location to the consumer in traditional and organised retailing. This research study is primarily exploratory in nature, and the research instruments include interviews...

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 use a dynamic oligopoly model of entry and exit with store-type differentiation to evaluate how entry regulations affect profitability, market structure and welfare. Based on unique data for all retail food stores in Sweden, we estimate demand, recover variable profits, and estimate entry...

This paper examines the relation between prices in conventional stores and on the Internet. Main results from the theoretical analysis are i) we expect a discrete fall in prices in conventional stores as the share of the population with access to Internet reaches a critical level, ii) the...

Research shows that grocery stores reduce prices to compete with Walmart Supercenters. This study finds evidence that the competitive effects of two other big box retailers – Costco and Walmart-owned Sam's Club – are quite different. Using city-level panel grocery price data matched with a...

A method to generate hypotheses on consumer payment behavior from market basket data is presented with which retailers can predict future cash requirements. This could help retailers to minimize the costs of cash management through rationalization and may also encourage the introduction of new...

Either empty inventories or empty shelves can cause stock-outs in retailing. Both can occur independently from each other, entail different kinds of damages and thus call for different counter measures. As such a counter measure, this paper presents a method to detect empty shelves through...

Barcode scanners were introduced in the 1970s as a way to reduce labor costs in stores, particularly at checkout. This paper is the first to estimate their effect on productivity. I use store-level data from the 1972, 1977, and 1982 Census of Retail Trade, matched to data on store scanner...

This paper formalizes an empirically implementable framework for the definition of local antitrust markets in retail markets. This framework rests on a demand model that captures the trade-off between distance and pecuniary cost across alternative shopping destinations within local markets. The...