Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Do Sales Matter? An Exploration of Price Discounting in UK Food Retailing

Contents:

Author Info

  • Lloyd, Tim A.
  • Morgan, C. Wyn
  • McCorriston, Steve
  • Zgovu, Evious
Registered author(s):

    Abstract

    This paper assesses the impact of promotional activity in the prices of food products on supermarket shelves. The study analyses a unique, high frequency panel of supermarket prices consisting of over 230,000 weekly price observations on around 500 products in 15 categories of food stocked by the UK’s seven largest retail chains. In all, 1,700 weekly time series are available at the barcode-specific level including branded and own label products. Prices are inclusive of promotions and thus allow the frequency, magnitude and duration of sales to be analysed in greater detail than has hitherto been possible with UK data. Using this price data, sales periods are indentified. Results show that around 8% of products are on sale at any one time, and that sales are typically four weeks in duration. The average discount is 24% of the regular price. Importantly, sales are shown to have a relatively modest role in overall price variation – less than the dispersion in prices by retailer, pointing to changes in the regular price, via general inflation and idiosyncratic shocks, as the principal cause of price variation.

    Download Info

    If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. 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.
    File URL: http://purl.umn.edu/51572
    Download Restriction: no

    Bibliographic Info

    Paper provided by International Association of Agricultural Economists in its series 2009 Conference, August 16-22, 2009, Beijing, China with number 51572.

    as in new window
    Length:
    Date of creation: Jun 2009
    Date of revision:
    Handle: RePEc:ags:iaae09:51572

    Contact details of provider:
    Email:
    Web page: http://www.iaae-agecon.org/
    More information through EDIRC

    Related research

    Keywords: Food retailing; pricing; sales; Demand and Price Analysis; Industrial Organization; Marketing; L16; L66; Q13;

    Find related papers by JEL classification:

    References

    References listed on IDEAS
    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.:
    as in new window
    1. Emi Nakamura & Jón Steinsson, 2008. "Five Facts about Prices: A Reevaluation of Menu Cost Models," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 123(4), pages 1415-1464, November.
    2. Fougère, Denis & Le Bihan, Hervé & Sevestre, Patrick, 2005. "Heterogeneity in Consumer Price Stickiness: A Microeconometric Investigation," CEPR Discussion Papers 5300, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    3. Caplin, Andrew S & Spulber, Daniel F, 1987. "Menu Costs and the Neutrality of Money," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 102(4), pages 703-25, November.
    4. Berck, Peter & Brown, Jennifer & Perloff, Jeffrey M. & Villas-Boas, Sofia B, 2007. "Sales : tests of theories on causality and timing," CUDARE Working Paper Series 1031, University of California at Berkeley, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Policy.
    5. Rajiv Lal & J. Miguel Villas-Boas, 1998. "Price Promotions and Trade Deals with Multiproduct Retailers," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 44(7), pages 935-949, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as in new window

    Cited by:
    1. Anania, Giovanni & Nistico, Rosanna, 2012. "Price dispersion, search costs and consumers and sellers heterogeneity in retail food markets," 2012 Conference, August 18-24, 2012, Foz do Iguacu, Brazil 125594, International Association of Agricultural Economists.

    Lists

    This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:iaae09:51572

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (AgEcon Search).

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

    If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.