This paper examines the relationship of 1987 retail grocery prices to supermarket sales concentration across 95 U.S. metropolitan areas. The regression model incorporates a large number of population, retail-cost, and retail competition factors and separate prices by type of grocery item. We...

Loyalty programs are widely used by firms but their effectiveness is not well understood. These programs provide discounts and perks to loyal customers and are costly to administer, and with uncertain effects on spending or stealing business from rivals. We use a large and detailed dataset on...

Loyalty programs are widely used by firms but their effectiveness is subject to debate. These programs provide discounts and perks to loyal customers and are costly to administer, and with uncertain effectiveness at increasing spending or stealing business from rivals. We use a large new dataset...

Loyalty programs are widely used by firms but their effectiveness is not well understood. These programs provide discounts and perks to loyal customers and are costly to administer, and with uncertain effects on spending or stealing business from rivals. We use a large and detailed dataset on...

Loyalty programs (LPs) are widely used by firms but not well understood. These programs provide discounts and perks to loyal customers and are costly to administer, but produce uncertain changes in spending patterns. We use a large and detailed dataset on customer shopping behavior at one of the...

The longevity of cartels has been a highly contested topic among economists and managers, with numerous researchers arguing that cartels are inherently unstable and their endurance is usually short-lived. Understanding the main factors that influence a cartel duration is essential from a...

Existing studies on Behaviour-based price discrimination (BBPD) typically show that firms offer discounts to encourage consumers located middle of the line segment to switch in a duopoly model. However, in practice, some firms offer both this discount and a discount to encourage consumers with...

We develop a framework to analyse stable cartelisation when firms can form multiple cartels. This contrasts with the existing literature which generally assumes, without further justification, that at most one cartel may form. We define cartelisation to be stable in the multiple cartels...

Targeted pricing is an aggressive strategy that steals demand from rivals. Previous studies have shown that a firm prefers targeted pricing to uniform pricing when another supply chain is vertically integrated and thus its downstream firm purchases an input at a constant price. This study...

There is limited theoretical understanding of cost pass-through within markets where prices are dispersed. Under a general demand function, we analyse the effects of cost changes in a seminal model of price dispersion, where some consumers are captive to particular sellers while others are not...