Supermarket Choice and Supermarket Competition in Market Equilibrium

Howard Smith

The Review of Economic Studies, 2004, vol. 71, issue 1, 235-263

Abstract: Multi-store firms are common in the retailing industry. Theory suggests that cross-elasticities between stores of the same firm enhance market power. To evaluate the importance of this effect in the U.K. supermarket industry, we estimate a model of consumer choice and expenditure using three data sources: profit margins for each chain, a survey of consumer choices and a data-set of store characteristics. To permit plausible substitution patterns, the utility model interacts consumer and store characteristics. We measure market power by calculating the effect of merger and demerger on Nash equilibrium prices. Demerger reduces the prices of the largest firms by between 2 and 3.8% depending on local concentration; mergers between the largest firms lead to price increases up to 7.4%. Copyright 2004, Wiley-Blackwell.

Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (130)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/0034-6527.00283 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:restud:v:71:y:2004:i:1:p:235-263

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().