How Critical Is a Good Location to a Regional Shopping Center?

The goal of this paper is to empirically measure the consumer utility tradeoff between store location (i.e., distance to a shopping center) and retail agglomeration in regional shopping centers. Using the Lakshmanan and Hansen retail expenditure model, our findings reveal that the distance specification is of surprisingly little importance in explaining retail sales. Conversely, agglomeration economies were of significant importance in explaining consumer patronage at regional shopping centers. The implication of these results is that smaller regional shopping centers may be dominated by large super-regional shopping centers with the smaller one or two anchor regional shopping centers unable to compete with the larger, many-anchored super-regional shopping centers.