Devising an effective means of measuring retail brand equity has become an intense preoccupation of, and a real challenge for, the technical literature. Many characteristics have been debated over time as to which of them make a real contribution to building retail brand equity (image) and some...

This paper documents and explains the recent rise of "big box" general merchandisers. Data from the Census of Retail Trade for 1977-2007 show that general-merchandise chains grew much faster than specialist retail chains, and that general merchandisers that added the most stores also...

This paper documents and explains the recent rise of "big box" general merchandisers. Data from the Census of Retail Trade for 1977-2007 show that general-merchandise chains grew much faster than specialist retail chains, and that general merchandisers that added the most stores also...

We consider a model of vertical competition where downstream firms (retailers) purchase an upstream input from a monopolist and are able to differentiate from each other in terms of quality. Our primary focus is to study the effects of introducing a large retailer, such as a Wal-Mart...

We study the role of store-format choices in dynamic competition between two major chains in the U.S. discount-store industry. The aim is to measure the effect on Kmart profits of Walmart Supercenters, which combine a full-service grocery with a regular discount store. The data are a six-year...

The supermarket equation is a differential equation peculiar to spatial science. The complex form of this equation is presented here and is used to study aggregate consumer shopping patterns. The focus is the relationship between trips to, and shopping within, planned shopping centres relative...

Using data on the number of visitors (identified according to the census block that they reside in) at the store level, this paper investigates the welfare costs of traditional shopping for the U.S. census blocks. The investigation is based on an economic model, where individuals living in...

In this paper, we first develop a game theoretic model of price competition between a pure play e-tailer and a bricks-and-clicks e-tailer. We show that in general, the pure play e-tailer has a lower equilibrium price. We then develop a simultaneous equation model of e-tailer price and traffic...

We analyze a sample of consumer-electronics products sold by the US NewEgg online-retailer to study the impact of Price Matching Guarantees (PMGs) policies on prices. By applying aDifference-in-Differences approach,we find that prices of the policy-adopting retailer increase by 4.7% during the...

This paper explores the role of retailers as an urban amenity. Using data for Swedish rural and city municipalities for 2002-2008, "accessibility to shops" measures are constructed for the shops in the municipalities and in the hosting regions separately to examine the relationship between...