This paper examines the importance of geographical differentiation in store location decisions of firms in the retail discount industry. Using a novel data set that includes the store locations and accompanying market conditions for all stores belonging to the Wal-Mart, Kmart, and Target chains,...

The retail sectors in many industrialized countries have experienced a large increase in concentration and the appearance of so-called "retail deserts", areas of low retail provision. This study addresses the role of international trade in this process. The analysis shows that by raising product...

We analyze the possibility and consequences of coalition-formation amongst suppliers of retail services. We first provide a framework in which producers of Substitutes have an incentive to Cluster in market places in order to attract consumers dispersed in space. Owing to spatial externalities,...

We develop a model of search among substitutes for the best combination of commodity variant and price, in which the structure of search costs is manipulable by the suppliers of these variants, e.g., by joining an existing market or opening a new one. We analyze the subgame-perfect equilibria...

We consider a quantity-location duopoly game in a spatial discrimination model in which we assume that the delivered goods can be imperfect substitutes or complements. The paper extends the analysis by Shimizu [Economics Letters 76 (2002)] who provides arguments to exclude the possibility for...

The aim of this paper is to revise and correct the results obtained in Beladi et al. [Beladi, H., Chakrabarti, A., Marjit, S., 2010. Cross-border merger, vertical structure, and spatial competition. Economics Letters 109, 112-114]. Specifically, we prove that the Nash equilibrium locations of...

We investigate the entry timing and location decisions under market-size uncertainty with Brownian motions in a continuous-time spatial competition duopoly model a la d'Aspremont et al. (1979). Under a sequential equilibrium, the threshold of the follower non-monotonically increases in...

Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing schemes are popular in certain industries and not others. We model the seller's choice of pricing scheme under various market structures assuming consumers share their surplus. We show that the profitability and popularity of PWYW depend not only on consumers'...

We examine welfare effects of real-time pricing in electricity markets. Before stochastic energy demand is known, competitive retailers contract with final consumers who exogenously do not have real-time meters. After demand is realized, two electricity generators compete in a uniform price...