Business Commons^™

How Critical Is A Good Location To A Regional Shopping Center?, Mark Eppli, James D. Shilling

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

The goal of this paper is to empirically measure the consumer utility trade-off between store location (i.e., distance to a shopping center) and retail agglomeration in regional shopping centers. Using the Lakshmanan and Hansen retail expenditure model, our findings reveal that the distance specification is of surprisingly little importance in explaining retail sales. Conversely, agglomeration economies were of significant importance in explaining consumer patronage at regional shopping centers. The implication of these results is that smaller regional shopping centers may be dominated by large super-regional shopping centers with the smaller one or two anchor regional shopping centers unable to compete …