Tirtha Pratim Dhar

Fast-Food Consumption and the Ban on Advertising Targeting Children: The Quebec Experience

Amid growing concerns about childhood obesity and the associated health risks, several countries are considering banning fast-food advertising targeting children. In this article, the authors study the effect of such a ban in the Canadian province of Quebec. Using household expenditure survey data from 1984 to 1992, authors examine whether expenditure on fast food is lower in those groups affected by the ban than in those that are not. The authors use a triple difference-indifference methodology by appropriately defining treatment and control groups and find that the bans effectiveness is not a result of the decrease in fast food expenditures per week but rather of the decrease in purchase propensity by 13% per week. Overall, the authors estimate that the ban reduced fast-food consumption by Us

An Empirical Assessment of Endogeneity Issues in Demand Analysis for Differentiated Products

88 million per year. The study suggests that advertising bans can be effective provided media markets do not overlap.

Milk by Any Other Name … Consumer Benefits from Labeled Milk

This article explores the issue of price and expenditure endogeneity in empirical demand analysis. The analysis focuses on the U.S. carbonated soft drink market. We test the null hypothesis that price and expenditures are exogenous in the demand for carbonated soft drinks. Using an almost ideal demand system (AIDS) specification, we strongly reject exogeneity for both prices and expenditures. We find that accounting for price/expenditures endogeneity significantly impacts demand elasticity estimates. We also evaluate the implications of endogeneity issues for testing weak separability. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

An Empirical Investigation of Private Label Supply by National Label Producers

This article uses revealed preferences of consumers to study the consumer benefits from rBST-free and organic labeled milk. The article specifies and estimates a quadratic AIDS demand system model for different milk types using U.S. supermarket scanner data. The introduction of rBST-free and organic milk is used to estimate consumer benefits that are decomposed into two components, competitive and variety effects. Results show significant consumer benefits from organic milk and to a lesser extent from rBST-free milk. Based on the findings, we explore implications for present U.S. labeling standards.

Can Margin Differences in Vertical Marketing Channels Lead to Contracts with Slotting Fees

Private labels PLs are ubiquitous in several categories, including groceries, apparel, and appliances. However, existing empirical work has not examined the differential impact of various upstream supply arrangements for PL products or the strategic motives for PL supply. To do so requires one to model the interaction between private and national label NL products both upstream and downstream while accounting for strategic behavior on the part of manufacturers and retailers and retaining essential differences between NL and PL products. We build a model that satisfies these requirements and lets us answer our two research questions: First, can an NL firm profit from being an outsourced PL supplier? Second, what are the upstream and downstream impacts of different PL supply arrangements? We answer these questions by modeling private labels as homogenous products at wholesale, but as differentiated products at retail. In contrast, national label products are differentiated at both wholesale and retail levels. Using structural model estimates for fluid milk in a major metropolitan area, we conduct three counterfactual experiments. We find that both NL producers and retailers profit from adding private labels. We also find that a vertically integrated supply of PL leads to lower prices for end consumers.

Mobile Computing Toys: Marketing Challenges and Implications

In this paper, we show that slotting fees can be part of an equilibrium solution if per-unit downstream margin is smaller than the per-unit upstream margin. In recent literature, a similar margin-based argument is made by Klein and Wright 2007, whereas intense downstream retail competition coupled with high upstream margin causes upstream manufacturers to offer slotting fees for promotional shelf space. In this paper, we generalize this argument and show that it is possible to have the margin-based argument without any downstream retail competition and competition between products within a retail chain. Interestingly we show that slotting fees will be larger if the products sold by a retailer are complements rather than substitutes. Using a model of a channel bargaining game, we also provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of slotting fees and show that for contracts with slotting fees under full vertical coordination, upstream marginal cost functions need to be increasing. Broadly, our findings provide new insights into the strategic role of downstream product assortment on equilibrium-marketing-channel contracts with slotting fees. This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.

Playoff payoff: Super Bowl advertising for movies ☆

Global sales of traditional toys such as dolls, action figures, and role-play games are either flat or shrinking. One of the main reasons for the slow or negative growth of sales is the increase in internet and console-based video gaming across multiple devices and platforms. Faced with this disruptive force, traditional toy makers are increasingly trying to develop toys that incorporate interactivity through software integration and mobile interconnectivity. Though the idea of creating this synergy between traditional toy hardware and emerging mobile/internet connectivity is a no-brainer, the success of such integration depends on understanding the market fundamentals of hardware and software complementarity. The responses of the toy industry thus far have been ineffective in stopping the decline of sales. This paper takes a closer look at the issue by conducting a brief survey of the traditional toy industry and trying to identify the key drivers of success and failure of such toys. We then use a few tools of marketing research to explain how traditional toy makers can leverage information and mobile technologies to re-establish themselves in a sustainable growth path.