The authors develop a new economic framework for the empirical analysis of retail margins. This framework formalizes the role of distribution services as outputs of retail activities. Their main results are the following: the measures of outputs of retail activities identified in the data perform as important and robust determinants of retail margins; variables that purport to capture oligopolistic features of market structure play a limited or no role in determining retail margins; quantity setting and price setting under the assumptions of profit maximization and monopolistic competition are categorically rejected by the data. The data base is information on 49 retail sectors from the 1982 U.S. Census of Retail Trades. Copyright 1993 by MIT Press.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)