Tao Chen, Yu Jeffrey Hu, Mohammad Rahman, Jiong Sun
{"title":"The Effects of Sister-Store Presence and Market Competition on Product Assortment: Evidence from Book Retailing","authors":"Tao Chen, Yu Jeffrey Hu, Mohammad Rahman, Jiong Sun","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3160337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3160337","url":null,"abstract":"When consumers’ preferred products are not carried by the retail chain store they visit, they may switch to purchasing these products from nearby sister stores of the same chain or from nearby competing stores. Such within- and across-chain substitution effects are enhanced as store-level product assortment information becomes increasingly available to consumers. It is important for scholars and practitioners to understand the effect of sister-store presence and market competition on retail product assortment strategies. In this paper, we obtain store-level product assortment data from a nationwide bookstore chain and study how sister-store presence and market competition can have an impact on the retail chain’s product assortment. In addition, we explore how this impact differs for niche and popular products. Our results show that having at least one sister store nearby reduces product assortment and such effects are stronger for niche products although having a competing store nearby increases product assortment and such effects are stronger for popular products.","PeriodicalId":402817,"journal":{"name":"Scheller: Marketing (Topic)","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131256002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Adithya Pattabhiramaiah, S. Sriram, Shrihari Sridhar
{"title":"Rising Prices under Declining Preferences: The Case of the U.S. Print Newspaper Industry","authors":"Adithya Pattabhiramaiah, S. Sriram, Shrihari Sridhar","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2885476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2885476","url":null,"abstract":"Between 2006 and 2011, daily print newspapers in the United States lost 20% of their paid subscribers, partly because of the increasing availability of alternative sources of news, such as free content provided on newspaper websites and by news aggregators such as Yahoo. However, contrary to the expectation that firms respond to softening demand by lowering prices, newspapers increased subscription prices by 40%–60% during this period. In this paper, we explain and quantify the factors responsible for these price increases. We calibrate models of readership and advertising demand using data from a top-50 U.S. regional print newspaper. Conditional on these demand models, we calibrate the newspaper’s optimal pricing equations and assess whether the increases in subscription prices are mainly rationalized by (a) the decline in overall reader willingness to pay (WTP) in the presence of heterogeneity among subscribers, which rendered it optimal for the newspaper to focus on the high WTP readers, or (b) the new...","PeriodicalId":402817,"journal":{"name":"Scheller: Marketing (Topic)","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132523060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}