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Market consolidation and pricing developments in grocery retailing: a case study
chapter
posted on 2015-05-01, 08:51 authored by Ratula Chakraborty, Paul W. Dobson, Jonathan Seaton, Michael WatersonWhen large retailers merge, there is a concern that a sudden and marked increase
in concentration will alter the intensity and nature of price competition to the
detriment of consumers. This chapter considers just such a situation in regard
to UK grocery retailing, which has witnessed steadily increasing concentration
over recent years, advanced by a series of mergers. Specifically, we examine the nature of price competition amongst the major “one-stop-shop” retail chains
before, during, and after the Safeway/Morrison merger in March 2004.We find the
merger offered consumers an immediate windfall benefit — with average prices
falling straight after the merger — and more intriguingly appears to have led to (or
at least is associated with) a marked change in the character of price competition
in the market.
Funding
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number RES-062-23-1962
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
The Analysis of Competition Policy and Sectoral Regulation World Scientific-Now Publishers Series in BusinessVolume
4Pages
3 - 29 (27)Citation
CHAKRABORTY, R. ... et al., 2014. Market consolidation and pricing developments in grocery retailing: a case study. IN: Peitz, M. and Spiegel, Y. (eds.) The Analysis of Competition Policy and Sectoral Regulation, 4, pp. 3 - 29.Publisher
World ScientificVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2014Notes
Closed access. This is a Cresse conference paper that was selected for publication in Volume 4 of the World Scientific-Now Publishers Series in Business, The Analysis of Competition Policy and Sectoral Regulation.ISBN
978-981-4616-35-5Book series
World Scientific-Now Publishers Series in Business;4Language
- en