This study examines in which cases economic forces or historical singularities prevail in the determination of the spatial distribution of retail shops. We develop a relatively general model of location choice in discrete space. The main force towards an agglomerated structure is the reduction of transaction costs for consumers if retailers are located closely, whilst competition and transport costs work towards a disperse structure. We assess the importance of the initial conditions by simulating the resulting distribution of shops for identical economic parameters but varying initial settings. If the equilibrium distributions are similar we conclude that economic forces have prevailed, while dissimilarity indicates that 'history' is more important. The (dis)similarity of distributions of shops is calculated by means of a metric measure.
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Paper provided by European Regional Science Association in its series ERSA conference papers with number
ersa05p175.
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.:
Alex Anas & Richard Arnott & Kenneth A. Small, 1998.
"Urban Spatial Structure,"
Journal of Economic Literature,
American Economic Association, vol. 36(3), pages 1426-1464, September.
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