Grocery retailing in Germany: Situation, development and pricing strategies

Like many other industrialised countries Germany has experienced a powerful concentration process in food retailing. There are some issues, however, which make Germany a special case in Europe and among industrialised countries in general. This holds true in terms of market structure and concentration, market development and pricing strategies. The market share of hard discounters like Aldi and Lidl has grown continuously in recent decades and the market share of discounters in general has reached a magnitude that is well above that found in other European countries. This has led to robust price competition in German food retailing. Along with this development, it has been very difficult for inward foreign direct investment (FDI) to gain ground in the German food retailing industry. One example was the market entry by Wal-Mart which, given its initial ambitious goals, was not successful. On the other hand, German hard discounters have strongly affected outward FDI by other German food retailers. In the process of expanding into other markets abroad, these companies have had a positive impact on exporting by the German food industry. This article describes and analyses these major trends in German food retailing in detail. It is organised as follows. The structure of food retailing is described and explained in Section 2. Section 3 deals with the importance of inward and outward FDI in German food retailing. It is discussed in both sections how increased concentration in food retailing affects the marketing chain. Price competition is intense in Germany, and studies of food pricing strategies have used scanner data. Therefore a special case study in Section 4 is the analysis of food pricing strategies in Germany based on scanner-data evidence. The analysis shows that the pricing behaviour of food retailers is characterised by the every-day-low-pricing (EDLP) strategies of discounters and the high-lowpricing (HiLo) strategies of their major competitors. The main elements of pricing policies are indicative of firms' market power: repeated price discounts for major food brands, frequent changes of loss leaders, the dominant role of psychological pricing, and a strong price rigidity for all other foods which are not on special offer. --

Grocery retailing in Poland: Structural changes and foreign direct investment

The development of the Polish food retailing sector is very interesting. With the transition from a socialist to a market economy, structural change in the retailing sector has been especially rapid and the new open markets in Poland have attracted foreign investors throughout the economy in general and in the foodretailing sector in particular. This article describes and analyses the major trends in Polish food retailing. It is organised as follows. The structure of food retailing is described and explained in Section 2, first at the store-type level and then at the firm level. How the powerful concentration process in food retailing has affected the marketing chain is also discussed. Inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in Polish food retailing is covered in Section 3. Given the special importance of FDI in the Polish economy during the transition process, an analysis is carried out of the determinants of FDI in retailing within a cross-country dataset and with a particularly detailed look at FDI in Poland. The results are summarised in Section 5. --

Flows and stochastic Taylor series in Ito calculus

For stochastic systems driven by continuous semimartingales an explicit formula for the logarithm of the Ito flow map is given. A similar formula is also obtained for solutions of linear matrix-valued SDEs driven by arbitrary semimartingales. The computation relies on the lift to quasi-shuffle algebras of formulas involving products of Ito integrals of semimartingales. Whereas the Chen-Strichartz formula computing the logarithm of the Stratonovich flow map is classically expanded as a formal sum indexed by permutations, the analogous formula in Ito calculus is naturally indexed by surjections. This reflects the change of algebraic background involved in the transition between the two integration theories

Levy Processes and Quasi-Shuffle Algebras

We investigate the algebra of repeated integrals of semimartingales. We prove that a minimal family of semimartingales generates a quasi-shuffle algebra. In essence, to fulfill the minimality criterion, first, the family must be a minimal generator of the algebra of repeated integrals generated by its elements and by quadratic covariation processes recursively constructed from the elements of the family. Second, recursively constructed quadratic covariation processes may lie in the linear span of previously constructed ones and of the family, but may not lie in the linear span of repeated integrals of these. We prove that a finite family of independent Levy processes that have finite moments generates a minimal family. Key to the proof are the Teugels martingales and a strong orthogonalization of them. We conclude that a finite family of independent Levy processes form a quasi-shuffle algebra. We discuss important potential applications to constructing efficient numerical methods for the strong approximation of stochastic differential equations driven by Levy processes.Comment: 10 page

Algebraic Structures and Stochastic Differential Equations driven by Levy processes

We construct an efficient integrator for stochastic differential systems driven by Levy processes. An efficient integrator is a strong approximation that is more accurate than the corresponding stochastic Taylor approximation, to all orders and independent of the governing vector fields. This holds provided the driving processes possess moments of all orders and the vector fields are sufficiently smooth. Moreover the efficient integrator in question is optimal within a broad class of perturbations for half-integer global root mean-square orders of convergence. We obtain these results using the quasi-shuffle algebra of multiple iterated integrals of independent Levy processes.Comment: 41 pages, 11 figure

Who is afraid of the Minotaure ?

Who is afraid of the Minoataure ? As an artist I'm interested since several years in mythology. The myth of the cretan labyrinth inspired me for a portfolio of silkscreen prints, drawings, collages and since 2008/2009 for photographies. The Minotaure, half man half bull as an emblematic figure of the monstrous, shut up in the architecture of the labyrinth in Cnossos designed by Daedalos, does actually question several topics on which my work is focused. How does the labyrinth as a fictional geography switch over to what the surrealist artist André Masson called “the labyrinth of the soul” (le labyrinthe de l'âme) ? How the figure of the Minotaure and the hybrid, the monstrous and strange(r) in general is involved in problems dealing with the questioning of my and our identity? The monstrous figure led me to work with techniques mixing painting, photogrpahy and drawing, experiencing in this way hybridity by graphic means. When artists like Pierre Molinier in the 1960' and Jürgen Klauke in the 1970' experienced the body as the geography of the monstrous and took pictures of those bodies, many artists our days work on the image of the body and its multiple means of transformation. Actually, production and reproduction of images get mixed up. My recent work “Identités” and “Eros-Thanatos”(2009), “Métamorphoses” (2010) and “Voil'(é)es” (2013/14) show this confusion. The image should therefore be considered as being in transition whose steps of successive transformations are more or less readable ... and the monsters are perhaps not hidden in the darkness of mazes, but are revealed in our fictions