Heterogeneous Preferences and Location Choice with Multi-Product Firms

Darlene Chisholm and George Norman ()

No 205, Discussion Papers Series, Department of Economics, Tufts University from Department of Economics, Tufts University

Abstract: This paper investigates whether the principle of minimum differentiation extends to the location choices of multi-product firms of different sizes supplying differentiated goods to consumers with heterogeneous tastes. Our analysis explicitly allows for the possibility that the resulting location equilibria will be asymmetric, and we compare the multiproduct equilibria with the location configurations that would arise if each outlet were operated by a single-product firm. We show that multi-product firms disperse their products if consumer heterogeneity is low or distance between markets is high. They adopt more dispersed locations than single product firms to limit business stealing from their own outlets. Asymmetry is shown to characterize location configurations of both multi-product and single-product firms.

Keywords: multi-product firms; location; heterogeneous tastes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D43 L13 R30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ase.tufts.edu/econ/papers/200205.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Heterogeneous preferences and location choice with multi-product firms (2004)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tuf:tuftec:0205

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers Series, Department of Economics, Tufts University from Department of Economics, Tufts University Medford, MA 02155, USA.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marcus Weir ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).