Market Channel Analysis of Ornamental Plants using Clustering Procedures

Market channel alternatives that include garden centers, landscapers, mass merchandisers and re-wholesalers have contributed to the growth of ornamental crops sales in the United States (U. S.). The homogenous subpopulation of the U.S. nursery producer was clustered using mixture of export method and found that there exist four homogenous group of Nursery Producer. The impact of growers’ business characteristics on shares of sales to these channels by firm size was estimated using multivariate fractional regression and nonparametric model. Important explanatory variables were regions of the U.S., sales of plant groups, kinds of contract sales, and promotional expenses, and their effect varies by cluster. We also found that in some cases nonparametric estimation procedure is better than parametric estimates.