Benaissa Chidmi

Brand-Supermarket Demand for Breakfast Cereals and Retail Competition

The Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995) market equilibrium model is extended to the supermarket chain level to examine consumer choices and retail competition for thirty-seven brands of breakfast cereals in Boston. Estimated taste parameters for product characteristics vary significantly across consumers. Although consumers are price-sensitive with respect to their chosen cereals, they exhibit strong brand and supermarket loyalty. Retail markups increase and marginal costs decrease with grocery market shares, attesting to oligopoly power with efficiencies. Markups decrease with the own-price elasticity of demand, with Corn Flakes having the highest markups. A detailed picture of consumer response and supermarket competition is provided.

Technical efficiency of US dairy farms and federal government programs

In this article, Technical Efficiency (TE) of dairy farms is estimated and analysed with two methodologies: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). Using DEA, the TE scores for different states are determined. Further, logistic regression is applied to TE scores to explain how known technical and policy variables affect a farms probability of being efficient. The second methodology employs SFA to estimate and analyse TE scores. Two federal milk policies are considered in this research: marketing policy and milk income loss policy. Federal milk marketing program has shown a significant and negative impact on TE with both methods. Payments under the milk income loss program have shown a positive significant impact in SFA analysis. Both methodologies produced similar outcomes on regional impacts and on the significance of several considered variables. Categorical representation of some variables in graphs provided some additional insights of their effects on TE.

Consumer demand for frozen seafood product categories in the United States

ABSTRACT Frozen seafood marketing in grocery stores in the United States (U.S.) has undergone substantial transformation as a result of the introduction of value-added and convenience products into the category. However, it is not yet clear whether consumers perceive these value-added products to be substitutes for the traditional unbreaded products. We model the demand for frozen seafood in the United States using the linear approximate almost ideal demand system (LA-AIDS) employing market-level monthly retail scanner panel data. Our emphasis is on the demand relationships between the three aggregate frozen seafood categories, namely, breaded products, entrées and unbreaded products, and on the demand relationships for these categories when disaggregated as finfish and shellfish. We use fixed effects on the spatial and temporal variation in demand and incorporated demographic shifter variables. Our results show that unbreaded products, as compared to value-added categories of breaded seafood and seafood entrées, would gain market share if expenditure on frozen seafood increases. We also find that unbreaded products are stronger substitutes for value-added products than vice versa. We explore similar relationships between frozen shellfish and finfish products. Unbreaded shellfish can be expected to gain market share if expenditure on frozen seafood were to increase.