Leone conducted the study with Francis Mulhern of Northwestern University and Jerome Williams of Pennsylvania State University. Their results appeared in the Journal of Retailing . Although the study looked only at liquor sales, Leone says the findings likely apply to other packaged goods people buy regularly. But for those with limited resources, buying extra diapers would mean they couldn't buy some of the other items that they need for the week. The results also suggest that African-Americans were less sensitive to price than other consumers, although this result may be related more to income than ethnicity because blacks in the area studied tended to have lower incomes, Leone says.
Leone says that's because much of the previous research was based on surveys.
But the value of this work is that we are looking at actual purchase behavior. The study used scanner data from a single chain that was the only liquor retailer in the area, Leone says. This allowed the researchers to study price responsiveness without the often confusing effects of competitive stores' pricing activities. The researchers chose stores in a variety of neighborhoods that featured substantial variability in income and ethnic composition. They examined census data that included income and ethnic characteristics for residents living within a one-mile radius of each store.