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Big Middle is the market space in which the largest retailers compete for majority of customers. The contribution of supply chain management to the evolution of the largest and most competitive battlefield in retailing, the Big Middle is discussed.

This paper explores wholesale pricing behavior within a two-level vertical channel consisting of a manufacturer selling through multiple independent retailers. The introduction of multiple retailers is important for several reasons. [...]

A fundamental task for supply-chain managers is to determine wholesale-prices. Such determination is a core theme in the marketing science literature on distribution channels--which seems to have concluded that channel [...]

The article examines how retailers have been trying out various ways of offering discounts for cash in line of credit card sales. Mobil, for instance, has lowered its wholesale price while adding a 3 percent processing fee for credit sales to induce station managers to favor cash sales. To maximize the discount-for cash policy's full potential, the retailer can limit the discounts to products that have a high proportion of credit sales, to specified high level of dollars spent by the customer on a visit, vary the discount with the amount bought, or sell customers cards entitling them to a discount or range of discounts.

Measures of price momentum, typically a moving average of previous price changes, are known to improve the predictive power of empirical price models. We introduce polynomially-smoothed price-trend derivatives as a refined momentum measure and apply them to a database of 216 consecutive months of Israeli housing prices. Over the entire housing price cycle and for phases characterized by prices that increase or decrease at an accelerating or decelerating rate, our models perform better than models with only economic fundamentals or those that add a moving average of past prices. We also show that some predictor variables that are significant over the entire housing cycle are not key predictors in all four phases; moreover, momentum is a key explanatory variable in some but not all phases of the housing price cycle.

The twelfth annual Macromarketing Conference was held at Concordia University, Montreal, August 6-9. The 65 attendees heard the 27 presentations and one panel discussion that are abstracted below. Also presented were tutorials by Roger Layton ("Tradeflows Modelling") and Robert Mittelstaedt ("STELLA"), and research in progress presentations by Al Alton, Labdhi Bhandari, Norm Kangun and Les Carlson, Tom Klein, Ed Popper, and Jim Stirling. The 1988 Conference will be held August 11-14 in San Jose.

The retailing system is regulated in various fashions by governments at all levels. One instance of such regulation in the United States is "blue laws. " Blue laws are legally imposed restrictions on retail operating hours. They impose a temporal "burden" on consumers who would prefer to shop during the proscribed hours. However, as a form of "compensation," these laws cause prices to be lower than they otherwise would be, for they diminish retail costs. The precise relationship between "burden" and "compensation" is developed mathematically. Empirical evidence of the effect of blue laws on expenditures per household is then presented. While there is no effect of blue laws on retailing in the aggregate, this neutrality does not exist for all lines of retail trade. Some lines experience greater expenditures and some lesser expenditures.

Determination of the nature and scope of competition in the channel of distribution is of increasing interest to macromarketers because of the growing importance of marketing in the American economy. This competition is influenced by many factors, among which is the extent of scale economies. This article investigates economies of scale in retailing from both a conceptual and an empirical perspective. This represents the first stage in an analysis of competition in retailing and, ultimately, throughout the channel of distribution.

Determination of the nature and scope of competition in the channel of distribution is of increasing interest to macromarketers because of the growing importance of marketing in the American economy. This competition is influenced by many factors, among which is the extent of scale economies. This article investigates economies of scale in retailing from both a conceptual and an empirical perspective. This represents the first stage in an analysis of competition in retailing and, ultimately, throughout the channel of distribution.

This article establishes a theoretical relationship between consumer satisfaction with the spatial marketing system and consumer expenditures on the product and service offerings of that system. Spatial marketing is defined as including those sectors where customers must travel to and from an outlet to acquire the offering; thus, it encompasses most of retailing and many of the consumer service industries. An empirical test is performed with 1977 data on grocery stores in 168 American SMSAs.

This paper compares the effects of four types of change in production uncertainty upon resource allocation in the neoclassical Harris-Todaro model and the neoclassical international trade theory model. The unique distinction of the former model is an exogenously mandated minimum wage in one sector of the economy that generates urban unemployment. In contrast, the latter model (which is a special case of the former) has free market forces operating throughout, so that full employment of all resources is assured. It will be shown that unemployment, or its absence, has a major influence upon the manner in which factor rewards and capital-labor ratios respond to changes in production uncertainty.

This paper extends the neoclassical, Harris-Todaro model of urban-rural migration to the case of production uncertainty in the agricultural sector. A unique feature of the Harris-Todaro model is an exogenously determined minimum wage in the urban sector that exceeds the rural wage. Migration occurs until the rural wage equals the expected urban wage („expected” due to employment uncertainty). The effects of a change in the minimum wage upon regional outputs, resource allocation, factor rewards, expected profits, and expected national income are explored, and the influence of production uncertainty upon the obtained results are delineated.

Consumers invest time and money in their shopping activities and they derive pleasure as well as goods from shopping. Consumer selection of retail stores reflects their perceptions of prices, distances, the time required to complete the desired purchases and the extent to which they enjoy shopping itself. This paper develops a model which incorporates these phenomena. The model implies that stores selling the same product may offer shopping experiences which appeal to customer groups with differing time needs. As a result, lower order stores may successfully locate adjacent to higher order stores because consumers exhibit different attitudes to time.

This paper develops a theoretical model of consumer purchase decisions in a competitive retail system. Emphasis is placed on the relationship between per household expenditures and consumers' surplus. It is shown that parametric changes can cause expenditures and surplus to move in opposite directions. Empirical evidence on factors which influence grocery and department store purchases is presented. Such evidence, in conjunction with the theoretical model, can offer insights into consumer attitudes towards the American retail system. A micro-level, behavioral analysis predicated upon this research is then proposed as a method of determining actual consumer attitudes.