Warehouse club (WC) retailers have typically expanded to new markets using stand-alone stores, rather than pursuing dense store networks as other (non-WC) retailers have in the past. While this strategy generates operating efficiencies, it also imposes high travel costs on households to shop,...

This paper presents an empirical study of the impact of Wal-Mart supercenter conversion (i.e., expansion of traditional discount-format stores by adding new departments) on consumer shopping behaviors. By using a difference-in-difference estimator and a joint model of store visits and...

This paper examines pairwise assortment similarities at U.S. supermarkets to understand how assortment composition and size are related to underlying factors that describe local store clientele, local competitive structure, and the retail outlets’ characteristics. The top-selling items, which...

A Simulated Maximum Likelihood (SML) estimator for the random coefficient logit model using aggregate data is found to be more efficient than the widely used Generalized Method of Moments estimator (GMM) of Berry-Levinsohn-Pakes (1995). In particular, the SML estimator is better than the GMM...

The number of mobile apps launched in the market has exponentially grown to more than 2 million, but little is known about how users choose and consume apps of numerous categories. This study develops a utility theory-based structural model for mobile app analytics. We use the theoretical...

We propose a new statistical instrument-free method to tackle the endogeneity problem. The proposed method models the joint distribution of the endogenous regressor and the error term in the structural equation of interest (the structural error) using a copula method, and makes inferences on the...

In many categories consumers display cyclical buying: they repeatedly purchase in the category for several periods, followed by several periods of not buying. We believe that the cyclicality is a manifestation of cross-category substitution by the consumer, caused by “variety seeking”...

Avenues for the delivery of loyalty programs have rapidly shifted from plastic card schemes to mobile-app-based initiatives; yet, our understanding of the economic value presented by the latter (i.e., loyalty apps) has not kept pace with this development. We examine the effects of loyalty app...

We propose a Simulated Maximum Likelihood estimation method for the random coefficient logit model using aggregate data, accounting for heterogeneity and endogeneity. Our method allows for two sources of randomness in observed market shares - unobserved product characteristics and sampling...