Strategic Obfuscation and Retail Pricing

Strategic Obfuscation and Retail Pricing

Retailers often stock items that are only slightly di¤erentiated from others’–di¤erent sizes of a popular brand, or di¤erent ‡avors in a common product line for instance. We argue that this practice is a form of strategic obfuscation, intended to raise consumer search costs, and margins on non-comparable products. We test our hypothesis using examples from several product categories in German a...

Fictitious Pricing in Retail

Prices in a wide variety of contexts come in three parts: an “original” or “suggested” price, a discount off that price, and the final price. Little empirical evidence is available that speaks to how each pricing component affects purchase behavior, even as theories abound. This paper outlines the main theories of fictitious pricing with their corresponding predictions and examines their releva...

Benchmarking Retail Productivity Considering Retail Pricing and Format Strategy

With increased competitive pressures in the grocery retailing industry, managers have greater interest in measuring the productivity of the stores of their own chain relative to the other similar stores. In this paper, we measure and compare the inefficiencies of major grocery retailers across various formats and pricing strategies using stochastic frontier (SF) methodology. Using a unique data...

Pricing in Retail Gasoline Markets

Zone Pricing in Retail Oligopoly

Multi-store retailers have the ability to offer different prices based on the geography of their stores. They sometimes do, but often only to a limited extent. This is observed in home improvement retailing, where the large retail chains charge different prices nationally but opt not to set prices store-by-store or even by market. Instead, prices are assigned to zones spanning several markets t...