Price flexibility in British supermarkets

This paper delivers a significantly different empirical perspective on micro pricing behaviour and its impact on macroeconomic processes than previous studies. We examine a seven year period of pricing behaviour by the major British supermarkets encompassing the recession year 2008 and the partial recovery of 2009. Several of our findings run strongly counter to established empirical regularities, in particular the high overall frequency of regular or reference price changes we uncover, the greater intensity of change in more turbulent times and the numerical dominance of price falls over rises. The pricing behaviour revealed also significantly challenges the implicit assumption that prices are tracking cost changes

Identifying and characterising price leadership in British supermarkets

Price leadership is a concept that lacks precision. We propose a deliberately narrow, falsifiable, definition and illustrate its feasibility using the two leading British supermarket chains. We find both firms engaging in leadership behaviour over a range of products, with the larger being somewhat more dominant but the smaller increasing leadership activity over time. Surprisingly, more price leadership events are price reductions than price increases, but the increases are of larger monetary amounts (so average price increases over time) and the events appear not necessarily related to cost changes. Price leadership appears to play some role in price increases

Market Consolidation and Pricing Developments in Grocery Retailing: A Case Study

When 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

Tax on alcohol is all wrong - I’ll drink to that

Dr Jonathan Seaton conducts research in the area of business economics focusing on supermarket price competition, sugary soda pricing and the impact of taxation on the price of alcoholic drinks. He is part of a team of internationally renowned researchers at UEA, Warwick and Sheffield who together have won grants totaling £1.5m from the medical research council and the ESRC. In this brief, Jon discusses the issues behind some of his recent research on one of Britain’s favorite addictive drugs – alcohol – and how we can achieve the right balance of a highly profitable export-led industry with the hard fact that many people die because of their overconsumption of it

Pricing in inflationary times- the penny drops

We investigate micro pricing behaviour in groceries (the UK’s most important consumer market) over eight years including the inflationary period of early 2008. We find behaviour sharply distinguished from most previous work, namely that overall basket prices rise but more individual prices fall than rise! This is consistent with retailers obscuring the fact of rising basket prices. We employ a significant new source of data that captures cross-competitor interplay in prices at a very detailed level. Unusually but importantly, our work takes into account that consumers buy baskets of goods, rather than individual products, when shopping at supermarkets.

Containing big soda: Countering inducements to buy large-size sugary drinks

Health concerns about overconsumption of large portions apply to a wide range of highly calorific foods and drinks. Yet, amongst all products, sugar-sweetened soft drinks and especially sugared soda are the ones which seem to raise the most ire because they contain little or no nutritional value beyond their sugar content and because of the way that vendors encourage excessive consumption by pricing jumbo-size portions to look like bargains while making smaller portions appear overpriced. This paper considers the logic of such extreme value size pricing and reveals why this marketing practice can harm economic welfare beyond public health concerns. The paper shows why policy interventions, including portion cap rules and soda taxes, seeking to reduce portion sizes and curb the consumption of large-size sugary drinks might fail when they do not fully take into account or appreciate the strategic responses that vendors might adopt to retain value size pricing

What Can we Learn about Improving Gifted Identification by Studying how Accurate the Process is in Arkansas?

How might we improve gifted and talented (G/T) identification by learning about the process in Arkansas (AR)? In this study, we examined the accuracy of the gifted identification process in AR by comparing the degree to which students who were academically talented in the top 5% on the 3 rd grade state assessment in reading and mathematics in AR were identified for G/T. Across five years of independent cohorts, we replicate the finding that roughly 30% of the students in the top 5% in both reading and mathematics on the 3 rd grade state assessment are not identified as G/T. Multivariate models indicate that high achieving students participating in the Federal Free/Reduced Lunch program were 11 percentage points less likely to be identified as G/T. Our study has policy implications for AR’s G/T screening strategies, and more broadly for G/T identification of low-income and historically marginalized groups. Using student achievement on the 3rd grade state assessment in reading and mathematics as a ‘universal screening’ tool could help these students receive the academic services they need to develop their talent to the fullest

Grain Physics and Rosseland Mean Opacities

Tables of mean opacities are often used to compute the transfer of radiation in a variety of astrophysical simulations from stellar evolution models to proto-planetary disks. Often tables, such as Ferguson et al. (2005), are computed with a predetermined set of physical assumptions that may or may not be valid for a specific application. This paper explores the effects of several assumptions of grain physics on the Rosseland mean opacity in an oxygen rich environment. We find that changing the distribution of grain sizes, either the power-law exponent or the shape of the distribution, has a marginal effect on the total mean opacity. We also explore the difference in the mean opacity between solid homogenous grains and grains that are porous or conglomorations of several species. Changing the amount of grain opacity included in the mean by assuming a grain-to-gas ratio significantly affects the mean opacity, but in a predictable way.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Ap