An international comparison of the determinants of retail gross margins

In this paper we compare the results of applying a new economic framework for the analysis of retail gross margins to 1982 interindustry retail data for France, Germany, and the U.S. Use of the same theoretical framework and econometric methodology separately for each of the three bodies of data yields robust empirical regularities with respect to functional form and the role of distribution services in explaining retail gross margins. An interesting feature of these results is that they arise despite substantial differences in classification and in the retail environment of the three countries.We thank E. Hoffnar and P. MacNeill for excellent research assistance. We acknowledge the financial support of INSEAD's R&D department for project R2135. We also thank the CSC at Maryland for support. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the MIT Northeast Marketing Colloquium, the Simon Graduate School of Management at the University of Rochester, the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, the Yale School of Organization and Management, the School of Business Administration at the University of Washington, and the Bureau of Economics of the Federal Trade Commission. We thank the participants in these seminars for their constructive criticisms. We are especially indebted to Peter Rossi of the University of Chicago, who provided us with helpful written comments, and to Herr Krockow of the Statistisches Bundesamt Wiesbaden, who provided us with unpublished data.     

Is globalization a road to duopoly?

In global markets, the market shares of the two or three biggest firms sum up more than 90 percent and firms do marketing efforts. However, the classical neo-walrasiano theoretical framework only is able to justify these stylized facts with particular firms’ cost structures, being one reason the presumption that there are no information costs. Towards the rationalization of those stylized facts, I study the evolution of the market structure in a model of price advertising with a variable that controls the degree of openness of regional markets. The main result of the model is that in equilibrium the structure of a global market is the duopoly.     

Unbundling democracy: Political rights and civil liberties

Much recent political economy and political science literature views democracy in terms of political rights. This view, often referred to as electoral democracy, is particularly pronounced in the empirical literature. We reincorporate the role of civil liberties, which are at the core of modern democracy, in two ways. We identify four fundamental sources of potential differences in the evolution of political rights and civil liberties. We present systematic, robust and varied empirical evidence on the direct impact of two of these potential sources of differences using cross-national panel data and accounting for the modernization hypothesis. We obtain two noteworthy empirical results: civil liberties exhibit greater persistence than political rights in affecting subsequent outcomes; and, our main result, civil liberties are complementary to political rights when affecting subsequent outcomes, while the reverse is not the case. Consequently, one must incorporate civil liberties as a determinant of electoral democracy. More generally, both dimensions must be considered to understand the setbacks recently experienced by many democracies, despite their holding of free and fair elections.     

The demand for and the supply of distribution services: A basis for the analysis of customer satisfaction in retailing

This paper brings together two bodies of literature. One of them is a literature on the special role of the consumer in retailing. The other one is the literature on customer satisfaction. This joining of literatures is accomplished by identifying distribution services as outputs of retail firms and fixed inputs into the production functions of consumers and relaxing the standard assumption that the demand for these services is always equal to the supply of these services. The result is a new conceptual framework for the analysis of customer satisfaction in retailing. This framework extends the basic ideas on customer satisfaction developed for manufacturing in a homogeneous single product setting to the heterogeneous multi-product setting relevant for many retailers. The paper illustrates one approach to the implementation of this framework with data for a set of supermarkets in Pamplona, Spain, that measure distribution services by asking consumers questions explicitly identifying these services. The five main categories of distribution services identified by the conceptual framework and measured in the data are economically important and statistically robust determinants of customer satisfaction with supermarkets. These results are obtained controlling for other variables typical of the customer satisfaction literature and measuring customer satisfaction in a manner consistent with that literature. The results are robust to corrections for sample selection and alternative estimation methods. Perhaps our most interesting novel result is that the effect of the determinants of customer satisfaction on future purchase intentions in the supermarket case is different when measured directly in a one stage process than when measured indirectly in a two stage process through the attributes/satisfaction/ purchase intentions chain.

The economics of retail firms

This paper identifies retail firms as an economic institution which delivers explicit products or services to consumer together with a variety of distribution services that determine the levels of distribution costs experienced by consumers in their purchase activities. The demand for the retailer's product is derived from a household production model in which the levels of distribution services provided by the retailer play the role of fixed inputs in the household's production functions. The supply of the retailer's product is derived from a joint cost function which is non-decreasing in the levels of distribution services provided. Profit-maximizing behavior in monopolistically competive markets shows that retail firms have special economic incentives to become complex organizations by integrating backwards, offering multiple explicit products and operating in more than one market. In addition, monopolistically competitive retail firms in long-run equilibrium will exhibit excess capacity, price dispersion and product choice in distribution services.     

A generalization of modern production theory

This paper analyses the relationship between inflation and equity returns in Australia over the period January 1974 to March 1996. Analysis is based on monthly and quarterly data, using value weighted equity indices at both the aggregate market and industry level. Three price indices, the consumer price index (CPI) (quarterly) and the manufactured materials used index (MMU) and the manufacturing articles produced index (MAP) (both monthly and quarterly) are used to measure inflation. Results provide little evidence of the statistically significant negative relationship observed in the US for the full study period. Analysis is also conducted on three subperiods, ‘monetary targeting’ (July 1976–January 1985), ‘checklist approach’ (February 1985–December 1989) and anti-inflation (January 1990–March 1996). At the market level the anti-inflation subperiod does provide some evidence of a negative relationship between inflation and equity returns though statistical significance is not apparent with quarterly time series. The impact of expected inflation on industry returns varies considerably. Consistent with the overall market analysis, the incidence of negative expected inflation betas increases in the latter anti-inflation subperiod. Finally, changes in Government inflation policy appear to have greatest impact on industrial company expected inflation betas.     

宝丽来之战略标准化管理模型:10项行动原则

摄影业回望 摄影业(photographic indus-try)已经被重新定义为"影像"业("imaging"industry),其组成也不再仅限于照相机、卤化银感光材料.在今天的美国,影像业已经发展成为了包含许多门类、税收高达1550亿美元的重要产业.除了业余和专业的摄影外,影像业还包括复印产品(copying products)和服务、形象艺术(graphic arts)、桌面出版系统(desktop publish-ing)、计算机辅助图像设计、医学诊断、显微镜方法、印刷以及消费者视频(consumer video)等等.     

Circular economy in Latin America: A systematic literature review

The purpose of this study is to identify circular economy concept trends of Latin America with regards to Europe, in which a systematic review of literature (SRL) was made using Scopus data in order to define the search, to select the relevant articles, and to analyze the results. Seventy‐one articles from Scopus were reviewed, and the analysis was complemented by the analysis with 57 documents from other scientific Web browsers such as Mendeley, Scopus, Academic Google, ScienceDirect, and SciELo which sum a total of 128 documents which the majority have come from Europe. Main concepts were identified, barriers and trends. The main conclusion was which the current concept is not very clear; in spite of Europe knows that limitation, Latin America is making the same mistake implementation.     

Expropriation risk and housing prices: Evidence from an emerging market

This paper examines the microeconomic determinants of residential real estate prices in Caracas, Venezuela, using a private database containing 17,526 transactions from 2008 to 2009. The particular institutional characteristics of many countries in Latin America, and Venezuela in particular, where land invasions and expropriations (with only partial compensation) have been common threats to property owners, provide us with an opportunity to test the effects of these risks on housing prices using a unique database. The effect of these risks on property prices is negative and significant. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to quantify these impacts in the Hedonic pricing literature applied to real estate. Size, the number of parking spaces, the age of the property, the incidence of crime, and the average income in the neighborhood are significant determinants of prices. Finally, this paper analyzes the microeconomic determinants of housing prices at the municipal level.