Consumer-product manufacturers, and retailers that sell their products, often sell slightly differentiated items for reasons other than appealing to heterogeneous tastes — different sizes of a popular brand, or different flavors in a common product line for instance. We argue that this...

In this paper, we analyze the strategic role of the recent introduction of national brand products by hard discounters in the French market and its impact both at the retail and manufacturer levels. We use a structural econometric model of vertical relationships that takes into account the...