Impact of conflict delisting and relisting on remaining products in retail stores: Sales gains across products categories and spillovers to nearby stores
H. Alice Li and
Xiang Wan
Production and Operations Management, 2023, vol. 32, issue 7, 2264-2282
Abstract:
Disputes between retailers and manufacturers often result in the retailer delisting the manufacturer's products, which dramatically alters competition in the retail market. When rival products are temporarily delisted, the products remaining on retail shelves are expected to gain sales due to substitution. However, it is unclear how much sales gain of remaining products can be expected, how long the sales gain persists after the rival products are relisted, whether the sales gain varies in different product categories, and whether the sales gain spills over from the delisting retailer to nearby retailers. In this research, we exploit a natural experiment enabled by a dispute between a retail chain and a beverage manufacturer that resulted in a 4‐week delisting of all products by the manufacturer (the delisted manufacturer) across all of the retailer's U.S. stores. We focus on a manufacturer (the focal manufacturer) that directly competes with the delisted manufacturer and quantify the sales gain for this focal manufacturer during the delisting and after the relisting event. Interestingly, in a near‐duopoly market, the focal manufacturer only gained 12.2% of sales during the delisting. After the dispute was settled and competition restored, the focal manufacturer's sales fluctuated for about 2 months before returning to the pre‐delisting level. Additionally, we find a spillover in sales gain to nearby stores during the delisting, which was mainly to small‐box retail stores rather than big‐box stores. Moreover, at both delisting and nearby stores, we find the focal manufacturer's sugar‐sweetened, caffeinated, and star products gained sales during the event while other products did not. We check the robustness of our results with a machine learning nonparametric method, among a few other alternative methods, to measure the average treatment effects. Understanding the size and duration of these heterogeneous effects can help manufacturers and retailers better respond to changes in market competition and evaluate their delisting decisions.
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.13972
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:popmgt:v:32:y:2023:i:7:p:2264-2282
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://onlinelibrary ... 1111/(ISSN)1937-5956
Access Statistics for this article
Production and Operations Management is currently edited by Kalyan Singhal
More articles in Production and Operations Management from Production and Operations Management Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().