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Industrial Organization Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Industrial Organization

Pricing Lower Or Buying Cheaper? How Grocery Consumers Pay Less During Seasonal Demand Peaks, Colin Watson Dec 2012

Pricing Lower Or Buying Cheaper? How Grocery Consumers Pay Less During Seasonal Demand Peaks, Colin Watson

Undergraduate Economic Review

The average price paid for a seasonal grocery category is (surprisingly) lower during the category's seasonal demand peak. For several product categories at one supermarket chain, demand peaks are shown to be associated with 1) consumer substitution to lower-quality products, 2) product price reductions, especially on products that increase their market shares, and as a result 3) a decline in the average price paid for the product category. In one very seasonal category, price reductions are driven by intertemporal substitution associated with large weekly discounts. Findings are consistent with any of several loss leader models.


Antitrust And The Costs Of Movement, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Oct 2012

Antitrust And The Costs Of Movement, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust is rightfully concerned about the structure of markets as well as the bargaining that occurs in them. As a result, the absolute cost of redeploying resources can be just as important as the transaction costs of arranging for their movement. This paper examines several broad themes in antitrust, considering the role of various assumptions about the costs of getting resources moved toward superior positions and the ability of the antitrust system to facilitate this movement. Part II very briefly examines structuralism as a theory underlying antitrust enforcement, particularly its assumptions about the difficulty and costs of moving resources. Harvard …


Rummaging Through The Bottom Of Pandora’S Box: Funding Predatory Pricing Through Contemporaneous Recoupment, Shaun D. Ledgerwood, Wesley J. Heath Jan 2012

Rummaging Through The Bottom Of Pandora’S Box: Funding Predatory Pricing Through Contemporaneous Recoupment, Shaun D. Ledgerwood, Wesley J. Heath

Shaun D. Ledgerwood

Predatory pricing doctrine is currently a dead area of the law. To proceed beyond summary judgment, a plaintiff must prove the predation created a "dangerous probability" of supracompetitive pricing as the mechanism for recouping the losses “invested” in the predation. This requires proof that the predator sold products below its average variable cost and raised an entry barrier that ultimately enabled the recoupment of profits at some later time. We offer an alternative to this two-phased recoupment model. In this paper we show that a multiproduct retailer can target loss leading behavior in a market segment to punish or eliminate …