The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Does Sutton apply to supermarkets?
Open accessAbstract
I present empirical evidence that endogenous fixed costs play a central role in determining the equilibrium structure of the supermarket industry. Using the framework developed in Sutton (1991), I construct a model of supermarket competition where escalating investment infirm‐level distribution systems is driven by the incentive to produce a greater variety of products in every store. Employing a store‐level census and 51 distinct geographic markets, I demonstrate that the supermarket industry is a natural oligopoly in which a small number of firms (between four and six)capture the majority of sales, regardless of market size.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Text-Based Network Industries and Endogenous Product Differentiation
Hoberg, G., & Phillips, G. (2016) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/688176 · Cited by 2,095
The Diffusion of Wal-Mart and Economies of Density
(2011) · Econometrica · doi:10.3982/ecta7699 · Cited by 445
Francis, J. R., Michas, P. N., & Seavey, S. E. (2013) · Contemporary Accounting Research · doi:10.1111/j.1911-3846.2012.01156.x · Cited by 322
COVID‐19 impact on fruit and vegetable markets
Richards, T. J., & Rickard, B. (2020) · Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics/Revue canadienne d'agroeconomie · doi:10.1111/cjag.12231 · Cited by 314
Adolescence and the Path to Maturity in Global Retail
Bronnenberg, B. J., & Ellickson, P. B. (2015) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.29.4.113 · Cited by 71
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Ellickson, P. B.
- Venue
- The RAND Journal of Economics
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2007-03
- Volume
- 38
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 43-59
- ISSN
- 0741-6261 (ISSN-L)
- 1756-2171
- OpenAlex
- W2005469898
- Cited by
- 207
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 27.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Does Sutton apply to supermarkets? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1756-2171.2007.tb00043.x
- The paper
- Ellickson, P. B. (2007). Does Sutton apply to supermarkets? The RAND Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-2171.2007.tb00043.x
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
