Multi-store firms are common in the retailing industry. Theory suggests thatc ross-elasticities between stores of the same firm enhance market power. To evaluate the importance of this effect in the U.K. supermarket industry, we estimate a model of consumer choice and expenditure using three data sources:profit margins for each chain, a survey of consumer choices and a data-set of store characteristics. To permit plausible substitution patterns, the utility model interacts consumer and store characteristics. We measure market powerby calculating the effect of merger and demerger on Nash equilibriumprices. Demerger reduces the prices of the largest firms by between 2 and 3.8% depending on local concentration; mergers between the largest firms lead to price increases up to 7.4%. Copyright The Review of Economic Studies Limited, 2004.

A recently published general theory of organizational response to regulation is examined. A number of problems are observed in regard to the basic assumption underlying the theory, the directionality of predicted relationships forming the theory, the exclusion of goal attainment as a realistic motivation for managing, and the generality of the theory.

The article discusses research pertaining to the degree to which organizational structure influences intrinsic motivation in the setting of voluntary religious organization. The sample consists of 44 conservative Protestant churches from denominations that include conservative Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Brethren, Lutheran, Nazarene and independent churches. Questionnaires were mailed to ministers and to randomly selected members from the membership rolls of each congregation. The structural variables examined in the study included standardization, formalization, integration, centralization, levels of hierarchy and organizational size. The findings suggest that in voluntary organizations there is a greater dependence on the intrinsically motivated activity of the participants.

In many competitive settings, consumers buy multiple product categories, and some prefer to use a single firm, generating complementary cross-category price effects. To study pricing in supermarkets, an organizational form where these effects are internalized, we develop a multi-category, multi-seller demand model and estimate it using UK consumer data. This class of model is used widely in theoretical analysis of retail pricing. We quantify cross-category pricing effects and find that internalizing them substantially reduces market power. We find that consumers inclined to one-stop (rather than multi-stop) shopping have a greater pro-competitive impact because they generate relatively large cross-category effects. (JEL D12, L11, L13, L81)

Cost containment is a dominant problem in the health care field, but it has not been addressed from a comprehensive management perspective. To fill this gap, we have developed an inclusive model of the cost containment process. The model has implications for management research in several areas: cost containment baselines, incentive systems, organization structures, cost/quality trade-offs, and cost containment constraints.

Abstract In many markets, buyers make discrete choices between differentiated products and negotiate prices that are specific to the choice. We develop for estimation a model for this class of markets which is consistent with non-cooperative models of bargaining between a buyer and competing sellers. We show that when the buyer’s utility has GEV disturbances, the model has a tractable likelihood function which can be used with transaction-level data giving the selected product and its price. We estimate the model using data from the UK brick industry and use it to measure market power and analyse mergers. We analyse how spatial differentiation and ownership concentration affect the distribution of market power across transactions. In counterfactuals we find that switching from individually negotiated to uniform pricing causes markups, and merger price effects, to increase on average but to decrease for a minority of transactions.