In view of increased competition, combined with political, economic, social and technological uncertainties, the Brazilian retail sector has been going through a transformation process led, on the one hand, by market pressure itself, and on the other hand, by the permanent struggle for survival. From this point of view, foreign and Brazilian retailers saw the own brand segment as a viable marketing alternative for maximizing their turnover and meeting consumer needs and wishes. In that sense, this research aimed to identify factors that affect risk perception of purchases of own brand food products. Using an exploratory and quantitative approach, structured electronic questionnaires were applied using Google Docs. SPSS software was used for data analysis with a convenience sample of 250 individuals. This allowed the application of multivariate analysis techniques. Factors that were generated from applied analyses allowed us to conclude that risk elements are perceived differently, according to each analyzed category.

The existence of switching costs for consumers may affect prices, market shares and therefore firms' profits. While firms have an incentive to increase prices and exploit its current consumers, they also might reduce prices to increase the number of consumers next period. This paper presents a model of consumer and pricing behavior with switching costs to investigate how prices, market shares and profits vary with different switching cost levels. I also present a method to estimate the parameters of a simpler version of the model and then perform counterfactual exercises using synthetic generated data. Results show that prices increase with switching costs and that market shares and profits increase for small switching cost values and decrease for larger ones.

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