This paper proposes a model featuring the heterogeneity of consumer preferences and analyzes the multiple equilibrium of retail formats by building a map of the relationships between consumer heterogeneity and retail formats. The key questions analyzed in this paper are how the retailer adjusts its combination of marketing elements through repositioning and how innovation in retail formats is i...

The study reported in this paper was undertaken in an attempt to identify and understand the impacts of electronic commerce in the car retail industry in Western Australia. Much of the existing literature in electronic commerce puts forward theoretical models and speculative argumentation in an attempt to describe and understand the electronic commerce phenomenon. In contradistinction to this t...

T bullwhip effect is the phenomenon of increasing demand variability in the supply chain from downstream echelons (retail) to upstream echelons (manufacturing). The objective of this study is to document the strength of the bullwhip effect in industry-level U.S. data. In particular, we say an industry exhibits the bullwhip effect if the variance of the inflow of material to the industry (what m...

We employ a stylized model of the electricity industry to examine the effects of restructuring on capacity investments, retail prices and welfare, allowing for uncertain demand. We consider the following market configurations: (i) integrated monopoly, (ii) integrated duopoly with wholesale trade, and (iii) separated duopoly with wholesale trade. We find that generators install sufficient capaci...

summary This study provides a model-based approach for implementing retail category management with a focus on markup decisions. We develop a reduced form Bayesian econometric model that captures price and sales variation for a retail chain. Based on this model, we derive the optimal retail markups on individual brands within a product category by maximizing the total category profit over a fin...

This paper studies the effect of private labeling on retailer competition -an issue neglected in literature until now. Once implemented, private labeling may well be less favorable to society than previously thought because it can encourage consolidation of the retail industry. Either with linear pricing (when goods are not loose substitutes) or with wholesale price discrimination (when goods a...

In this paper, we consider a future path of the electricity industry that builds on lessons learned from experience and the principle of risk management. A main argument is that restructuring of the electricity industry is a process, not an event, which should be evolutionary, depending on local circumstances. This evolutionary path stays midway between extremes of vertical integration and dire...