How Critical is a Good Location to a Regional Shopping Center?

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 with the larger, many-anchored super-regional shopping centers

THE 2002 SUPERMARKET PANEL ANNUAL REPORT

The Supermarket Panel collects data annually from individual supermarkets on store characteristics, operations, and performance. It was established in 1998 by the Food Industry Center as the basis for ongoing study of the supermarket industry. The Panel is unique because the unit of analysis is the individual store and the same stores are tracked over time. This makes it possible to analyze the processes by which new technologies, business practices, and competitive forces are changing the industry. The 2002 Supermarket Panel consists of 866 stores selected at random from the nearly 32,000 supermarkets in the U.S. or invited to participate through their affiliation with cooperating retail companies or IGA. These 866 stores are located in forty-nine states. They are a representative cross section of the industry, including stores from all formats that belong to ownership groups ranging from single stores to the countrys largest chains.Industrial Organization, Marketing,

“‘Relentless Geography’: Los Angeles’ Imagined Cartographies in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange,”

What would a map of Los Angeles drawn from the ground up look like? In his groundbreaking work The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre argues that the conceived space of urban planners is fundamentally distinct from lived space, which cannot be mapped out. In her impressive city-wide narrative, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) demonstrates the effects of imposing conceived space upon the lived space of inner city Los Angeles residents, and what happens when the counter-model of space being lived by a city’s inhabitants rebels. Yamashita’s text mirrors this disjuncture between represented and lived space through the use of narrative surrealism. Space is magically reconfigured in the city, shrinking the uninhabited Downtown and expanding over-populated yet underrepresented neighborhoods, literally shifting geographically until its mapping matches the social space of those on the ground rather than those who map it from above. Literary criticism on the novel to date has largely interpreted Tropic of Orange as a commentary on the effects of globalization; not enough attention has been paid to the novel’s surreal expansion of Los Angeles’ inner city. Using Lefebvre’s “science of space,” anchored by Los Angeles’ city planning schemas, I argue that Yamashita offers a different map, one perceived by the subsets of LA’s population that fall through the cracks of the city’s grid. Tropic of Orange’s unorthodox formal structure, when combined with its narrative surrealism, creates a differential space in the text, transforming the novel into the Los Angeles imagined by its anonymous users

Morse at Enoshima and Tokyo

In which our hero sets up a marine laboratory at Enoshima in the summer of 1877 and then, in the fall, takes up his position as first professor of Zoology at the Imperial University in Tokyo. And how he excavates the kitchen middens at Omori and introduces archeology to Japan; and how he brings his family to live there for two years; and how he begins to collect pottery; and how he learns how to waste (enjoy?) time; and how he leaves in 1879 with many interests and ideas that were not his just three years before

Valuing iconic design: Frank Lloyd Wright architecture in Oak Park, Illinois

This study investigates the willingness of homebuyers to pay for co-location with iconic architecture. Oak Park, Illinois was chosen as the study area given its unique claim of having 24 residential structures designed by world-famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, in addition to dozens of other designated landmarks and three preservation districts. This study adds to the limited body of existing literature on the external price effects of architectural design and is unique in its focus on residential architecture. We find a premium of about 8.5% within 50-100m of the nearest Wright building and about 5% within 50-250m. These results indicate that an external premium to iconic architecture does exist, although it may partially be attributable to the prominence of the architec

THE 2003 SUPERMARKET PANEL ANNUAL REPORT

Executive Summary The Food Industry Center established the Supermarket Panel in 1998 as the basis for an ongoing study of the supermarket industry. Since 2000 the core of the Panel has been a random sample of stores drawn from the approximately 32,000 supermarkets in the U.S. that accept food stamps. The purpose of collecting data on supermarket operations and performance is to: Provide timely, useful information for the industry through benchmark reports and annual summaries, trends on key indices of technology adoption, competitive positions and performance. Be a ready source of data for research on current and emerging issues - to be able to track the changes in operation and its impacts on performance over time. This report presents findings from the 2003 Supermarket Panel, and provides an overview of findings from the past four years. The 2003 Panel includes 391 stores that are a representative cross-section of the supermarket industry. The Panel tries to follow the same stores over time. Of the 391 stores, 268 were in the Panel in 2002. Nine percent of the stores have been in the Panel all four years. At least one store from every state is in the Panel. New in 2003 The Panel was offered over the Internet. Forty-seven percent responded on-line. An index on variety offering was created. Questions about offering irradiated fresh ground beef are included (with a follow up study). Supply Chain Technology Practices The Supply Chain Score measures the extent to which stores have adopted computerized methods of communicating with suppliers, handling inventory management, ordering, invoicing, and analyzing consumer purchases. The average score has almost doubled in four years. Stores in groups (chains) with more than 750 stores and/or supercenter formats have adopted supply chain practices most intensively. Internet/Intranet is used by at least two-thirds of all stores; over ninety percent of stores in groups with more than 50 stores use this technology. Vendor managed inventory has been adopted by only 42 percent of stores in the biggest store groups with much lower rates of adoption in smaller store groups. A higher Supply Chain Score benefited significantly higher sales per labor hour. Service and Variety Scores About eighty percent of stores in all size groups offer bagging and custom meat cutting. Variety pays off in better performance for five out of eight measures. Variety helps to grow annual percentage sales. Supercenters/Top Stores/Unions Supercenters have significantly higher sales per labor hour and per transaction. They have lower sales growth. Fifty-three percent of supermarkets face supercenter competition. They have somewhat higher sales per square foot of selling area and higher annual sales growth than stores that do not face supercenter competition. Eleven percent of stores in the 2003 Panel qualified as "top stores." They had above the median levels for each of three performance measures: weekly sales per square foot, sales per labor hour, and annual percentage sales growth. Top stores are more likely to have a unionized labor force, be a price and variety leader, and be wholesaler supplied. One-third of 2003 Panel stores have unionized labor. These stores have more productive labor with significantly higher sales per labor hour. Statistically Significant Drivers of Performance Over Time The descriptive profile and analysis of the Panel provide useful insights on the structure of the supermarket industry and factors associated with strong performance. However, statistical regression analysis identifies whether a variable is significantly correlated with a performance measure holding all else constant. This section presents findings from a multivariate regression analysis of five key performance measures. These regression analyses are summarized on the table below. If a characteristic is listed on the table it was a significant correlate in at least three out of the past four years. For example, in the last row, the only variable that was consistently significant for increasing annual percentage sales growth is being in an area with higher household incomes. Having a warehouse format decreased sales growth and three other factors were significant in at least three years but alternated with positive and negative effects.Industrial Organization, Marketing,

Models and Performance of VANET based Emergency Braking

The network research community is working in the field of automotive to provide VANET based safety applications to reduce the number of accidents, deaths, injuries and loss of money. Several approaches are proposed and investigated in VANET literature, but in a completely network-oriented fashion. Most of them do not take into account application requirements and no one considers the dynamics of the vehicles. Moreover, message repropagation schemes are widely proposed without investigating their benefits and using very complicated approaches. This technical report, which is derived from the Master Thesis of Michele Segata, focuses on the Emergency Electronic Brake Lights (EEBL) safety application, meant to send warning messages in the case of an emergency brake, in particular performing a joint analysis of network requirements and provided application level benefits. The EEBL application is integrated within a Collaborative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) which uses network-provided information to automatically brake the car if the driver does not react to the warning. Moreover, an information aggregation scheme is proposed to analyze the benefits of repropagation together with the consequent increase of network load. This protocol is compared to a protocol without repropagation and to a rebroadcast protocol found in the literature (namely the weighted p-persistent rebroadcast). The scenario is a highway stretch in which a platoon of vehicles brake down to a complete stop. Simulations are performed using the NS_3 network simulation in which two mobility models have been embedded. The first one, which is called Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) emulates the behavior of a driver trying to reach a desired speed and braking when approaching vehicles in front. The second one (Minimizing Overall Braking Induced by Lane change (MOBIL)), instead, decides when a vehicle has to change lane in order to perform an overtake or optimize its path. The original simulator has been modified by - introducing real physical limits to naturally reproduce real crashes; - implementing a CACC; - implementing the driver reaction when a warning is received; - implementing different network protocols. The tests are performed in different situations, such as different number of lanes (one to five), different average speeds, different network protocols and different market penetration rates and they show that: - the adoption of this technology considerably decreases car accidents since the overall average maximum deceleration is reduced; - network load depends on application-level details, such as the implementation of the CACC; - VANET safety application can improve safety even with a partial market penetration rate; - message repropagation is important to reduce the risk of accidents when not all vehicles are equipped; - benefits are gained not only by equipped vehicles but also by unequipped ones