Buyer Market Power in UK Food Retailing

Tim Lloyd, Steve McCorriston, Wyn Morgan and Habtu T. Weldegrebriel

No 46007, Working Papers from Scottish Agricultural College, Land Economy Research Group

Abstract: The potential existence of buyer market power in UK food retailing has attracted the scrutiny of the UK's anti-trust authorities, culminating in the decision to launch the second of two comprehensive regulatory inquiries in recent years. Throughout, detection of buyer power has been dogged by the paucity of reliable evidence of its existence. In this paper we present a simple theoretical model of oligopsony which delivers quasireduced form retailer-producer pricing equations in which the presence of market power can be detected using readily available market data. Using a cointegrated vector autoregression, we find empirical results that are consistent with the presence of oligopsony power in all six food products investigated.

Keywords: Buyer power; Cointegrated VARs; UK food industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-11
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://purl.umn.edu/46007 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:saclwp:46007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Scottish Agricultural College, Land Economy Research Group
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by AgEcon Search ().