Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/car/carecp/01-05.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Dominant Retailers and the Countervailing Power Hypothesis

Author

Abstract
The growing dominance of powerful big-box retailers in recent years has enhanced the interests in Galbraith's (1952) hypothesis of countervailing power. The objective of this paper is to assess rigorously this hypothesis using a theoretical model that captures the main ingredients of Galbraith's arguments as well as some of the important features of retail industry. It is demonstrated that consistent with the hypothesis an increase in the amount of countervailing power possessed by a dominant retailer can indeed lead to a fall in retail price for consumers. But this fall in retail price is not the result of a benevolent retailer acting on behalf of consumers but of a self-interested supplier trying to offset the reduction in profits caused by the rise in countervailing power. Total surplus does not always increase with the rise of countervailing power because of the possible efficiency loss on production side. Furthermore, the presence of fringe competition is crucial for countervailing power to benefit consumers and that there is a limit to how far a dominant retailer will go in its pursuit of countervailing power. The analysis in this paper, therefore, does not support the contention that countervailing power can replace competition as the regulatory mechanism of the economy.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhiqi Chen, 2001. "Dominant Retailers and the Countervailing Power Hypothesis," Carleton Economic Papers 01-05, Carleton University, Department of Economics, revised 2003.
    • Handle: RePEc:car:carecp:01-05
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www1.carleton.ca/economics/research/working-papers/carleton-economic-papers-cep-2001-2010/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    countervailing power; buyer power; dominant firm;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L42 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Vertical Restraints; Resale Price Maintenance; Quantity Discounts
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:car:carecp:01-05. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Court Lindsay (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    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.