An empirical analysis of shopping basket similarities across consumers

Jungwon Yeo

Applied Economics, 2024, vol. 56, issue 1, 98-116

Abstract: What makes shopping baskets similar or different across consumers and how much of shopping basket similarities is explained by similarities in observable characteristics, especially when a typical basket includes a few hundred products as a result of the consumer’s purchase decisions over tens of thousands of products? I attempt to answer these questions by expressing the entirety of households’ baskets as a vector of expenditure shares on various grocery products and computing pairwise cosine similarities. I find households’ shopping baskets vary greatly, with similarities in the demographic profiles and where they shop explaining only about 13%-16% of their similarities. The similarity in where households shop has the largest explanatory power, orders of magnitude larger than similarities in demographic profiles such as income and race. It underlines the importance of similarities in the products offered to households in explaining similarities in the products they ultimately purchase.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2023.2166673 (text/html)
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:taf:applec:v:56:y:2024:i:1:p:98-116

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2023.2166673

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().