Price transmission in vertically-related markets

The thesis aims to contribute to the literature on two fronts. Firstly, it aims to contribute to the literature by developing a conjectural variations model of price transmission in vertically related markets where the final product sector exercises both oligopoly power and oligopsony power. It finds that oligopoly and oligopsony power do not necessarily weaken the degree of price transmission relative to that under perfectly competitive markets although they can. The key to these outcomes is to be found in the functional forms for retail demand and farm supply. Secondly, it attempts to draw inferences about the conditions under which the prices of the farm and retail prices cointegrate by themselves based on the predictions of the existing theoretical models of vertical price transmission. It then evaluates whether these conditions are borne out empirically. To this end, it tests for the existence of a co-integrating relation between the raw input and retail prices for a sample of 11 food and energy markets in the UK using the Johansen Full-information Maximum Likelihood Procedure. It finds that a co-integrating relation is identified for only 4 out of 11 price pairs; i.e., for potato, fresh fruits, milk and oil. For all other price pairs, it is not identified unless the cointegration regression allows for sector shocks. This result seems to support our theoretical prediction that, given information provided by a price pair alone, co-integration can be observed only for products for which the cost share of the farm input is unity; i.e., for products with a constant margin. And obviously, potatoes, fresh fruits and milk are products which are sold in supermarkets as they appear in their raw form with minimum processing involved suggesting that the share of processing cost for these products is minimal

Buyer power in U.K. food retailing: a 'first-pass' test

Habtu Weldegebriel, University of Warwick Abstract The potential existence of buyer power in U.K. food retailing has attracted the scrutiny of the U.K.'s anti-trust authorities, culminating in the second of two comprehensive regulatory inquiries in recent years. Such inquiries are authoritative but correspondingly time-consuming and costly. Moreover, detection of buyer power has been dogged by the paucity of reliable evidence of its existence. In this paper, we present a simple theoretical model of oligopsony which delivers quasi-reduced form retailer-producer pricing equations with which the null of perfect competition can be tested using readily available market data. Using a cointegrated vector autoregression, we find empirical results that show the null of perfect competition can be rejected in seven of the nine food products investigated. Though not conclusive on the existence of buyer power, the proposed test offers a means via which the behaviour of the retail-producer price spread is consistent with it. At the very least, it can corroborate the concerns of the anti-trust authorities as to whether buyer power is potentially one source of concern

Price transmission in vertically-related markets

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo