IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/jincot/v17y2017i4d10.1007_s10842-017-0246-3.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Single Espresso, Please! Rationalizing Espresso Price Dispersion Across Italian Cities

Author

Listed:
  • Flavio Delbono

    (University of Bologna)

  • Gemma Dipoppa

    (University of Pennsylvania)

  • Luca Lambertini

    (University of Bologna)

  • Carlo Reggiani

    (University of Manchester)

Abstract

This paper aims at providing an explanation of the observed espresso price dispersion across major Italian cities. We present some preliminary empirical evidence that suggests a positive relationships between the average espresso price in a city and the number of coffee shops (normalized for the adult population) operating in that city. The finding is shown to be robust after controlling for GDP per capita and consumers’ price index. We provide an interpretation of the empirical findings relying on a model of price competition where firms adjust the mark-up to offset the negative effect of any increase in their number.

Suggested Citation

  • Flavio Delbono & Gemma Dipoppa & Luca Lambertini & Carlo Reggiani, 2017. "A Single Espresso, Please! Rationalizing Espresso Price Dispersion Across Italian Cities," Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, Springer, vol. 17(4), pages 465-478, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:jincot:v:17:y:2017:i:4:d:10.1007_s10842-017-0246-3
    DOI: 10.1007/s10842-017-0246-3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10842-017-0246-3
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10842-017-0246-3?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dastidar, Krishnendu Ghosh, 1995. "On the Existence of Pure Strategy Bertrand Equilibrium," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 5(1), pages 19-32, January.
    2. Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Viacheslav Sheremirov & Oleksandr Talavera, 2018. "Price Setting in Online Markets: Does IT Click?," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 16(6), pages 1764-1811.
    3. Alon Eizenberg & Saul Lach & Merav Oren-Yiftach, 2021. "Retail Prices in a City," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 13(2), pages 175-206, May.
    4. Yilmazkuday, Hakan, 2016. "Constant versus variable markups: Implications for the law of one price," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 154-168.
    5. Frankel, David M. & Gould, Eric D., 2001. "The Retail Price of Inequality," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(2), pages 219-239, March.
    6. Austan Goolsbee & Chad Syverson, 2008. "How Do Incumbents Respond to the Threat of Entry? Evidence from the Major Airlines," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 123(4), pages 1611-1633.
    7. Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Oleksandr Talavera, 2017. "Price Setting in Online Markets: Basic Facts, International Comparisons, and Cross-Border Integration," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(1), pages 249-282, January.
    8. F. Delbono & L. Lambertini, 2015. "Bertrand versus Cournot with Convex Variable Costs," Working Papers wp994, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    9. Yilmazkuday, Hakan, 2014. "Price dispersion across US districts of entry," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 123(3), pages 361-365.
    10. Crucini, Mario J. & Yilmazkuday, Hakan, 2014. "Understanding long-run price dispersion," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 226-240.
    11. Marhsall, Robert C. & Marx, Leslie M., 2014. "The Economics of Collusion: Cartels and Bidding Rings," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262525941, April.
    12. Michael R. Baye & John Morgan & Patrick Scholten, 2006. "Information, Search, and Price Dispersion," Working Papers 2006-11, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, Department of Business Economics and Public Policy.
    13. Mark V. Pauly & Mark A. Satterthwaite, 1981. "The Pricing of Primary Care Physicians' Services: A Test of the Role of Consumer Information," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 12(2), pages 488-506, Autumn.
    14. Krishnendu Dastidar, 2001. "Collusive outcomes in price competition," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 73(1), pages 81-93, February.
    15. Giuseppe Francesco Gori & Luca Lambertini & Alessandro Tampieri, 2014. "Trade costs, FDI incentives, and the intensity of price competition," International Journal of Economic Theory, The International Society for Economic Theory, vol. 10(4), pages 371-385, December.
    16. Yongmin Chen & Michael H. Riordan, 2008. "Price‐increasing competition," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 39(4), pages 1042-1058, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Crucini, Mario J. & Yilmazkuday, Hakan, 2014. "Understanding long-run price dispersion," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 226-240.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Liu, Yue, 2016. "Price dispersion across countries and the heterogeneous impacts of income differences," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 64-67.
    2. Marie-Laure Cabon-Dhersin & Nicolas Drouhin, 2020. "A general model of price competition with soft capacity constraints," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 70(1), pages 95-120, July.
    3. Kazuhiro Takauchi & Tomomichi Mizuno, 2022. "Endogenous transport price, R&D spillovers, and trade," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(5), pages 1477-1500, May.
    4. Kazuhiro Takauchi & Tomomichi Mizuno, 2019. "Is competition in the transport industry bad?A welfare analysis of R&D with inter-regional transportation," Discussion Papers 1910, Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University.
    5. Tomomichi Mizuno & Kazuhiro Takauchi, 2020. "Optimal Export Policy With Upstream Price Competition," Manchester School, University of Manchester, vol. 88(2), pages 324-348, March.
    6. Gyódi Kristóf & Sobolewski Maciej & Ziembiński Michał, 2017. "What Drives Price Dispersion in the European E-commerce Industry?," Central European Economic Journal, Sciendo, vol. 3(50), pages 53-71, December.
    7. Rigbi, Oren, 2017. "The Effects of Mandatory Disclosure of Supermarket Prices," CEPR Discussion Papers 12381, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    8. Alberto Cavallo, 2017. "Are Online and Offline Prices Similar? Evidence from Large Multi-channel Retailers," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(1), pages 283-303, January.
    9. Diego Aparicio & Zachary Metzman & Roberto Rigobon, 2024. "The pricing strategies of online grocery retailers," Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME), Springer, vol. 22(1), pages 1-21, March.
    10. José Anson & Mauro Boffa, 2018. "Consumer Arbitrage in Cross-Border E-commerce," RSCAS Working Papers 2018/17, European University Institute.
    11. Alex Nikolsko‐Rzhevskyy & Oleksandr Talavera & Nam Vu, 2023. "The flood that caused a drought," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 61(4), pages 965-981, October.
    12. Dvir, Eyal & Strasser, Georg, 2018. "Does marketing widen borders? Cross-country price dispersion in the European car market," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 134-149.
    13. David Card & Ana Rute Cardoso & Joerg Heining & Patrick Kline, 2018. "Firms and Labor Market Inequality: Evidence and Some Theory," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 36(S1), pages 13-70.
    14. Ray, Sourav & Snir, Avichai & Levy, Daniel, 2023. "Retail Pricing Format and Rigidity of Regular Prices," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, pages 1-1.
    15. Barthélémy Bonadio & Andreas M Fischer & Philip Sauré, 2020. "The Speed of Exchange Rate Pass-Through," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 18(1), pages 506-538.
    16. Delbono, Flavio & Lambertini, Luca, 2016. "Ranking Bertrand, Cournot and supply function equilibria in oligopoly," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 73-78.
    17. Marie-Laure Cabon-Dhersin & Nicolas Drouhin, 2020. "Soft-Capacity constrained price competition with entry and a minimum firm size: Chamberlin without differentiation," Working Papers hal-02909801, HAL.
    18. Marie-Laure Cabon-Dhersin & Jonas Didisse, 2017. "Inter-university competition and high tuition fees," Post-Print hal-02356872, HAL.
    19. Yiquan Gu & Leonardo Madio & Carlo Reggiani, 2019. "Exclusive Data, Price Manipulation and Market Leadership," CESifo Working Paper Series 7853, CESifo.
    20. Patrick Kline & Neviana Petkova & Heidi Williams & Owen Zidar, 2019. "Who Profits from Patents? Rent-Sharing at Innovative Firms," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 134(3), pages 1343-1404.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Price dispersion; Espresso prices; Market competition;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • L66 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - Food; Beverages; Cosmetics; Tobacco

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:jincot:v:17:y:2017:i:4:d:10.1007_s10842-017-0246-3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.