Retail expansion is led by multi-store firms, which often mix two organizational forms: franchised and company-owned outlets (“franchising decisions”). The authors examine whether strategic considerations in entry and expansion play a role in organizational-form decisions, such as...

We study firm performance dynamics in retail growth using a dynamic model of expansion that allow these dynamics to operate through an unobserved serially correlated process. The model is estimated with data on convenience-store chain diffusion across Japanese prefectures from 1982 to 2012,...

Spatial competition among multi-store firms is ubiquitous in a wide range of retail industries. However, little is known about how those firms optimize their networks of stores after a merger due to the computational burden of solving for an equilibrium in store networks. This paper proposes an...

Information frictions play a key role in a wide array of economic environments and are frequently incorporated into formal models as search costs. Yet, as search costs are typically unobserved, little empirical work investigates the determinants of the distribution of consumer search costs and...

Competition among multi-store chains is common in retail industries.This paper proposes a method for eliminating a model of strategicstore-network choices by two chains. In contrast to previous studies, Iallow chains to not only choose which markets to enter but also how manystores to open in...