Sales by multi‐product retailers: a comment

Abstract

Immanent to the retail business is its multiproduct nature. In a recent issue of this journal Richards (2006) introduces a multiproduct model for perishable food items. Richards concludes that depth and breadth of sales are complementary marketing tools to increase store sales. He also provides empirical support for this hypothesis. We will show in the following that Richards' model does not suggest a complementarity between depth and breadth of sales. Instead, these tools are substitutes in his model. Therefore, the interpretation of his empirical result has to be reconsidered. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Farmgate prices, retail prices, and supermarkets' pricing decisions: An integrated approach

“…Intuitively, this discussion implies that the (relative) prices of the advertised goods are governed by a Ramsey pricing rule equivalent to the one governing the relative prices of the unadvertised goods described earlier. Consistent with the previous literature, the choices of the set of promoted goods and their prices are interdependent (Loy & Weiss, ; Richards, ).…”