Most supermarket firms choose to position themselves by offering either "Every Day Low Prices" (EDLP) across several items or offering temporary price reductions (promotions) on a limited range of items. While this choice has been addressed from a theoretical perspective in both the marketing and economic literature, relatively little is known about how these decisions are made in practice, especially within a competitive environment. This paper exploits a unique store level dataset consisting of every supermarket operating in the United States in 1998. For each of these stores, we observe the pricing strategy the firm has chosen to follow, as reported by the firm itself. Using a system of simultaneous discrete choice models, we estimate each store's choice of pricing strategy, conditional on its expectation over the choices of its rivals. We find evidence that firms cluster by strategy, choosing actions that agree with those of its rivals. We also find a significant impact of various demographic and firm characteristics, providing some qualified support for several specific predictions from marketing theory.
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Paper provided by Duke University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
06-02.
Length: 35 pages Date of creation: 2006 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:duk:dukeec:06-02
Contact details of provider: Postal: Department of Economics Duke University 213 Social Sciences Building Box 90097 Durham, NC 27708-0097 Phone: (919) 660-1800 Fax: (919) 684-8974 Web page: http://www.econ.duke.edu/
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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.:
Varian, Hal R, 1980.
"A Model of Sales,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 70(4), pages 651-59, September.
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