Coupling weekly grocery transaction records with the exact location and opening date of entering Walmarts over an eleven year period, we examine how Supercenter entry affects prices and revenues at incumbent supermarkets. We find that entry within one mile of an incumbent causes a sharp 16% drop...

This paper explores and quantifies the importance of parent brand state dependence to forward looking pricing outcomes in the area of umbrella branding and multi-product firms. We show through numerical simulations that loyalty (inertia) to the parent brand can decrease prices and reduce...

This paper proposes and tests a model of supermarket competition based upon John Sutton's (1991) endogenous fixed cost (EFC) framework. The relevance of the EFC framework to supermarket competition stems from the industry's surprisingly uniform competitive structure: irrespective of the size of...

This paper develops a dynamic model of retail competition and uses it to study the impact of the expansion of a new national competitor on the structure of urban markets. In order to accommodate substantial heterogeneity (both observed and unobserved) across agents and markets, the paper first...

We empirically examine how firms learn to set prices in a new market. The 2012 privatization of off-premise liquor sales in Washington State provided a unique opportunity to observe how retailers learn to price from the point at which the learning process begins. Tracking this market as it...

We examine the role of store branded "private label" products in determining bargaining outcomes between retailers and manufacturers in the single-serve brew-at-home coffee category. Exploiting a novel setting in which the dominant, single-serve technology was protected by a patent that...

We measure the effects of chain economies, business stealing, and heterogeneous firms' comparative advantages in the discount retail industry. Traditional entry models are ill-suited for this high-dimensional problem of strategic interaction. Building upon recently developed profit inequality...