Coverage of retail stores and discrete choice models of demand: Estimating price elasticities and welfare effects

Franco Mariuzzo, Patrick Walsh () and Ciara Whelan

International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2010, vol. 28, issue 5, 555-578

Abstract: Consumers' choice set of products within stores can be limited. Ackerberg and Rysman (2005) address this problem by modeling unobserved consumer preferences over products and retail stores, leading to augmented demand specifications. Having Carbonated Soft Drink product level data, where we observe products' store coverage, we are able to estimate their logit, nested logit and random coefficient logit specifications of demand in a structural model of equilibrium. Allowing for store coverage turns out to have a very significant impact on the estimated structural parameters and on the predictive power of the model. Taking these estimated structural parameters we perform a counterfactual whereby stores carry all products in the market. We find systematic increases in price elasticities and welfare in our new equilibrium. Competition in markets is more curtailed than normally assumed in structural models of industries.

Keywords: Carbonated; soft; drinks; Differentiated; products; Discrete; choice; Store; coverage; Structural; model; Price; elasticities; Welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-7187(10)00018-4
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Coverage of Retail Stores and Discrete Choice Models of Demand: Estimating Price Elasticities and Welfare Effects (2009)
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:eee:indorg:v:28:y:2010:i:5:p:555-578

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Industrial Organization is currently edited by P. Bajari, B. Caillaud and N. Gandal

More articles in International Journal of Industrial Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().