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Industrial organization (Economic theory) --- Industries --- Economic aspects.

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We review major changes in the economics of the US retail sector over the past 15-20 years and discuss what these portend for the future evolution of retail. The sector has been shrinking in relative size over the long term, though this stopped around the onset of the Great Recession. Retail has experienced stronger-than-average productivity growth that has not been accompanied by commensurate wage growth. The main forces shaping the retail landscape in recent decades have been the expansions of two formats: e-commerce and warehouse clubs. While both formats have been the subject of study and discussion, we find evidence that warehouse clubs have had to this point a greater effect on retail than e-commerce has. This impact has been manifested in changes in the retail sector's scale, concentration, dynamism, and urbanization. Thus while e-commerce will continue to expand and physical retail will further evolve in the coming years, the physical format is unlikely to meet its demise soon.

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Oligopoly models of price competition predict that strategic firms exercise market power and generate inefficiencies. However, heterogeneity in firms' strategic ability also generates inefficiencies. We study the Texas electricity market where firms exhibit significant heterogeneity in how they deviate from Nash equilibrium bidding. These deviations, in turn, increase the cost of production. To explain this heterogeneity, we embed a Cognitive Hierarchy model into a structural model of bidding and estimate firms' strategic sophistication. We find that firm size and manager education affect sophistication. Using the model, we show that mergers that increase sophistication can increase efficiency despite increasing market concentration.

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We document the degree of price dispersion and the similarities as well as differences in pricing and promotion strategies across stores in the U.S. retail (grocery) industry. Our analysis is based on "big data" that allow us to draw general conclusions based on the prices for close to 50,000 products (UPC's) in 17,184 stores that belong to 81 different retail chains. Both at the national and local market level we find a substantial degree of price dispersion for UPC's and brands at a given moment in time. We document that both persistent base price differences across stores and price promotions contribute to the overall price variance, and we provide a decomposition of the price variance into base price and promotion components. There is substantial heterogeneity in the degree of price dispersion across products. Some of this heterogeneity can be explained by the degree of product penetration (adoption by households) and the number of retail chains that carry a product at the market level. Prices and promotions are more homogenous at the retail chain than at the market level. In particular, within local markets, prices and promotions are substantially more similar within stores that belong to the same chain than across stores that belong to different chains. Furthermore, the incidence of price promotions is strongly coordinated within retail chains, both at the local market level and nationally. We present evidence, based on store-level demand estimates for 2,000 brands, that price elasticities and promotion effects at the local market level are substantially more similar within stores that belong to the same chain than across stores belonging to different retailers. Moreover, we find that retailers can not easily distinguish, in a statistical sense, among the price elasticities and promotion effects across stores using retailer-level data. Hence, the limited level of price discrimination across stores by retail chains likely reflects demand similarity and the inability to distinguish demand across the stores in a local market.

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We introduce a model of dynamic pricing in perishable goods markets with competition and provide conditions for equilibrium uniqueness. Pricing dynamics are rich because both own and competitor scarcity affect future profits. We identify new competitive forces that can lead to misallocation due to selling units too quickly: the Bertrand scarcity trap. We empirically estimate our model using daily prices and bookings for competing U.S. airlines. We compare competitive equilibrium outcomes to those where firms use pricing heuristics based on observed internal pricing rules at a large airline. We find that pricing heuristics increase revenues (4-5%) and consumer surplus (3%).