This paper studies shopping hour decisions by retail chains and independent competitors. We use a Salop-type model where retailers compete in prices and shopping hours. Our results depend significantly on efficiency differences between retail chain and independent retailer. If the efficiency...

We investigate the effect of market structure on market performance in the market for consumer electronics. This research is novel, because we exploit product life cycle information to build an instrumental variable for the number of firms in a market, a variable which hitherto had to be treated...

Institutional barriers to entry were removed to a considerable extent in 1996 in the Dutch retail sector. Three years before that the regulator decided to not take legal actions anymore against entrants violating institutional requirements. In the current analysis we investigate the effects of...

We analyze the interaction between market structure and market performance and how it varies over the product cycle. To account for the potential endogeneity in this relation, we use an instrumental variable approach. We combine data from the largest Austrian online market for price comparisons...

Electronic shelf label (ESL) is an emerging price display technology around the world. While these new technologies require non-trivial investments by the retailer, they also promise significant operational efficiencies in the form of savings in material, labor and managerial costs. The presumed...

Asymmetric pricing or asymmetric price adjustment is the phenomenon where prices rise more readily than they fall. We offer and provide empirical support for a new theory of asymmetric pricing in wholesale prices. Wholesale prices may adjust asymmetrically in the small but symmetrically in the...

The choice of an appropriate e-commerce strategy is crucial for the survival of online stores in B2C e-commerce business. We use a comprehensive data set from the Austrian price search engine geizhals.at to identify successful e-commerce strategies. An e-commerce strategy is a set of choices...

This paper studies competition in prices and opening hours in a model with free entry. It is shown that under free competition a market failure arises: Entry is excessive and opening hours are under-provided. Restrictions on opening hours aggravate this failure. I analyze the impact of a...

We provide a theory of how RPM facilitate upstream cartels absent any information asymmetries using a model with manufacturer and retailer competition. Because retailers have an effective outside option to each manufacturer's contract, the manufacturers can only ensure contract acceptance by...