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- Title
Winning Big: Scale and Success in Retail Entrepreneurship.
- Authors
Hollenbeck, Brett; Giroldo, Renato Zaterka
- Abstract
This paper uses lottery allocation of retail store entry licenses as a natural experiment to understand the size and source of returns to scale in retail. In 2014, Washington State used a lottery system to allocate licenses to firms in the newly legalized retail cannabis industry, generating random variation in how many stores entrepreneurs were able to own. We observe highly detailed data on all subsequent industry transactions, including prices, wholesale costs, markups, and product assortments. We find that entrepreneurs who are randomly allocated more store licenses ultimately earn substantially higher per store profits than do single-store firms, suggesting that the returns to scale in the mom-and-pop retail sector are quite large. Despite these firms having less local competition, this increase in profits does not come at the expense of consumers. Rather, retailers in multistore chains ultimately charge significantly lower prices and margins and offer greater product variety. This gap in prices is not initially present but grows substantially over time, as does the difference in assortment size and profits between stores in multistore chains and stores operating alone, consistent with firm learning. Using the full history of outcomes, we track the evolution of firms in this new market and show that multistore retailers use an initial advantage in offering larger assortments to position themselves as the low-price, large-assortment retail option and attract a larger but more price-sensitive set of customers. These results have implications for the study of retail concentration and mergers, countervailing buyer power, and consumer search. Our results suggest that policies to help entrepreneurs expand in retail may have large benefits to both firms and consumers.
- Subjects
WASHINGTON (State); RETURNS to scale; ENTREPRENEURSHIP; RETAIL stores; MARIJUANA industry; CHAIN stores
- Publication
Marketing Science, 2022, Vol 41, Issue 2, p271
- ISSN
0732-2399
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1287/mksc.2021.1316