Estimating network economies in retail chains
Subtitle: a revealed preference approach
By: Paul B. Ellickson, Stephanie Houghton, Christopher Timmins
Contributors: Houghton, Stephanie, 1980-; Timmins, Christopher; National Bureau of Economic Research
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 15832; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 15832.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Description: "We measure the effects of chain economies, business stealing, and heterogeneous firms' comparative advantages in the discount retail industry.  Traditional entry models are ill-suited for this high-dimensional problem of strategic interaction.  Building upon recently developed profit inequality techniques, our model admits any number of potential rivals and stores per location, an endogenous distribution network, and unobserved (to the econometrician) location attributes that may cause firms to cluster their stores.  In an application, we find that Kmart and Target benefit most from local chain economies; Wal-Mart's advantage is more global.  We explore these results with counterfactual simulations highlighting these offsetting effects"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 3/23/2010.

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