Slotting fees, per-unit-time payments made by manufacturers to retailers for shelf space, have become increasingly prevalent in grocery retailing. Shelf space contracts are shown to be a consequence of the normal competitive process when retailer shelf space is promotional, in the sense that the shelf space induces profitable incremental individual manufacturer sales without drawing customers from competing stores. In these circumstances, retailer and manufacturer incentives do not coincide with regard to the provision of promotional shelf space, and manufacturers must enter shelf space contracts with retailers. Retailers are compensated for supplying promotional shelf space at least partially with a per-unit-time slotting fee when interretailer price competition on the particular product makes compensation with a lower wholesale price a more costly way to generate equilibrium retailer shelf space rents. Our theory implies that slotting will be positively related to manufacturer incremental profit margins, a fact that explains both the growth and the incidence across products of slotting contracts in grocery retailing.

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We build on social identity models of environmental collective action by considering the role of people's access to cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo. We developed a new measure of cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo, and examined its ability to predict environmental activist identification and willingness to engage in environmental activism. In Study 1 (N = 386), we developed the initial scale, and found evidence for its reliability and validity. The ability to imagine cognitive alternatives was associated with other relevant social identity and environmental variables including perceived legitimacy of the current environmental status quo, pro-environmental consumer and activist behavior, and beliefs in anthropogenic climate change. In Study 2 (N = 393), we confirmed the factor structure of the scale and found that it was a strong predictor of environmental activist identification, explaining variance beyond extensive control variables including identification with nature. It also explained additional variance in willingness to engage in activist behavior beyond even environmental activist identification. Our results suggest that the ability to imagine cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo might have important implications for whether people engage in pro-environmental collection action to mitigate climate-change and other environmental problems.

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