Search

This study examines in which cases economic forces or historical singularities prevail in the determination of the spatial distribution of retail shops. We develop a model of location choice in discrete space. The main force towards an agglomerated structure is the reduction of transaction costs for consumers if retailers are located closely, whilst competition and transport costs work towards a disperse structure. We assess the importance of the initial conditions by simulating the resulting distribution of shops for identical economic parameters but varying initial settings. If the equilibrium distributions are similar we conclude that economic forces have prevailed, while dissimilarity indicates that ‘history’ is more important. The (dis)similarity of distributions of shops is calculated by means of a metric measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If we take into account the spatial dimension of markets, prices of incumbent firms may be higher and consumer surplus may be lower with competition than with monopoly. This result obtains unambiguously, even in the supposedly highly competitive case of Bertrand competition. Moreover, we are able to show that consumers of the commodity may be worse off with duopoly, if the distance between the firms' sites is sufficiently large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]