IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/iefi07/6579.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Role of Retail Services in Food Market Equilibrium

Author

Listed:
  • Chidmi, Benaissa
  • Lopez, Rigoberto A.

Abstract

The increasing importance of services in industrialized economies is reflected in the relative importance of service in product offerings at the retail level. Yet, typical economic studies account only for physical product attributes in models of product differentiation even when conducted with retail data. In U.S. food retailing, the issue is very important as raw farm products account for only 19% of every dollar the consumer pays for food, most of the remaining going to services that do not transform the product but that add consumer utility and cost. In this paper, we examine this issue using the case of breakfast cereals in Boston in the context of upscale retail services provided by supermarkets. Focusing on ready-to-eat cereals (RTECs) allows us to look more closely at the role of services in product market equilibrium. First, supermarket retail services go beyond the obvious single product exchange function as consumers value services and suppliers incur a cost in providing them. Given that retail services affect the primitives of the market, i.e., demand and costs, they also affect retail prices. Third, regardless of inter-supermarket variation in costs and prices, the issue of who’s got the power in the RTEC vertical market channel has been a hotly debated issue. The usual suspect has been the RTEC manufacturing industry, although previous studies have not modeled the retailing stage of the marketing channel to determine their relative contribution to channel price-cost margins and the role of retail services. The conventional wisdom is that the RTEC manufacturing industry mutes price competition and engages in non-price competition (Schmalensee, 1978; Scherer, 1982). This paper contributes to the literature in two important ways. First, it extends the Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (BLP, 1995) model of market equilibrium to ready-to-eat cereals (RTECs) in Boston by including consumer taste for supermarket retail services. Second, it tests and compares alternative pricing games between manufactures and supermarkets in order to assess their relative market power.

Suggested Citation

  • Chidmi, Benaissa & Lopez, Rigoberto A., 2007. "The Role of Retail Services in Food Market Equilibrium," 2007 1st Forum, February 15-17, 2007, Innsbruck, Austria 6579, International European Forum on System Dynamics and Innovation in Food Networks.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:iefi07:6579
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.6579
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/6579/files/sp07ch01.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.6579?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Berry, Steven & Levinsohn, James & Pakes, Ariel, 1995. "Automobile Prices in Market Equilibrium," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 63(4), pages 841-890, July.
    2. Aviv Nevo, 2000. "A Practitioner's Guide to Estimation of Random‐Coefficients Logit Models of Demand," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 9(4), pages 513-548, December.
    3. Scherer, F M, 1979. "The Welfare Economics of Product Variety: An Application to the Ready-to-Eat Cereals Industry," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(2), pages 113-134, December.
    4. Douglas Rivers & Quang Vuong, 2002. "Model selection tests for nonlinear dynamic models," Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 5(1), pages 1-39, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hovhannisyan, Vardges & Stiegert, Kyle W., 2011. "Vertical Channel Analysis of the U.S. Milk Market," 2011 Annual Meeting, July 24-26, 2011, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 103631, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    2. Chidmi, Benaissa & Lopez, Rigoberto A. & Cotterill, Ronald W., 2004. "Vertical Relationships In The Ready-To-Eat Breakfast Cereal Market: A Brand-Supermarket Level Analysis," 2004 Annual meeting, August 1-4, Denver, CO 19916, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    3. Chidmi, Benaissa & Lopez, Rigoberto A. & Cotterill, Ronald W., 2005. "A Supermarket-Level Analysis of Demand for Breakfast Cereals: A Random Coefficients Approach," 2005 Annual meeting, July 24-27, Providence, RI 19236, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    4. Kaplow, Louis & Shapiro, Carl, 2007. "Antitrust," Handbook of Law and Economics, in: A. Mitchell Polinsky & Steven Shavell (ed.), Handbook of Law and Economics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 15, pages 1073-1225, Elsevier.
    5. Tovar, Jorge, 2012. "Consumers’ Welfare and Trade Liberalization: Evidence from the Car Industry in Colombia," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 40(4), pages 808-820.
    6. Julie Holland Mortimer, 2007. "Price Discrimination, Copyright Law, and Technological Innovation: Evidence from the Introduction of DVDs," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 122(3), pages 1307-1350.
    7. Nathan H. Miller, 2008. "Competition When Consumers Value Firm Scope," EAG Discussions Papers 200807, Department of Justice, Antitrust Division.
    8. Bonnet, Céline & Requillart, Vincent, 2010. "Is The Eu Sugar Policy Reform Likely To Increase Obesity?," 115th Joint EAAE/AAEA Seminar, September 15-17, 2010, Freising-Weihenstephan, Germany 116414, European Association of Agricultural Economists.
    9. Celine Bonnet & Pierre Dubois & Sofia B. Villas Boas & Daniel Klapper, 2013. "Empirical Evidence on the Role of Nonlinear Wholesale Pricing and Vertical Restraints on Cost Pass-Through," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(2), pages 500-515, May.
    10. Leung, Tin Cheuk, 2015. "Music piracy: Bad for record sales but good for the iPod?," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 1-12.
    11. Céline Bonnet & Pierre Dubois, 2010. "Inference on vertical contracts between manufacturers and retailers allowing for nonlinear pricing and resale price maintenance," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 41(1), pages 139-164, March.
    12. Rebecca Hellerstein & Sofia Berto Villas-Boas, 2006. "Arm's-length transactions as a source of incomplete cross-border transmission: the case of autos," Staff Reports 251, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    13. Philip G. Gayle, 2013. "On the Efficiency of Codeshare Contracts between Airlines: Is Double Marginalization Eliminated?," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 5(4), pages 244-273, November.
    14. Knittel Christopher R. & Stango Victor, 2008. "Incompatibility, Product Attributes and Consumer Welfare: Evidence from ATMs," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 1-42, January.
    15. Chao, Hong & Ho, Chun-Yu & Leung, Tin Cheuk & Ng, Travis, 2017. "To root or not to root? The economics of jailbreak," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 45(3), pages 481-497.
    16. Joseph Farrell & David Balan & Keith Brand & Brett Wendling, 2011. "Economics at the FTC: Hospital Mergers, Authorized Generic Drugs, and Consumer Credit Markets," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 39(4), pages 271-296, December.
    17. Susan Athey & Guido W. Imbens, 2007. "Discrete Choice Models With Multiple Unobserved Choice Characteristics," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 48(4), pages 1159-1192, November.
    18. Mitsuru Sunada, 2008. "Network effects with quality change: an empirical analysis of the Japanese mobile telecommunications market, 1995-2001," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(8), pages 657-674.
    19. Kaiser, Ulrich & Mendez, Susan J. & Rønde, Thomas & Ullrich, Hannes, 2014. "Regulation of pharmaceutical prices: Evidence from a reference price reform in Denmark," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 174-187.
    20. Weifang Lou & David Prentice & Xiangkang Yin, 2008. "The Effects of Product Ageing on Demand: The Case of Digital Cameras," Working Papers 2008.06, School of Economics, La Trobe University.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Agribusiness; Marketing;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:iefi07:6579. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ilbonde.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.