Producer And RETailer markets OrganizationPARETO (PARETO)

消费者目前受到前所未有的通货膨胀上升的影响，这种上升在食品和零售市场尤为严重。这种现象与新冠肺炎危机等外生冲击有关，但也可能是对特定监管或零售链条不同层面市场力量的行使做出反应。并不是所有国家和产品市场都受到同样的影响，这就提出了为什么会存在异质效应的问题。这个项目的目标是更好地记录和理解这种异质性，并为经济政策得出建议。我们专注于几个产品类别和国家的生产者和零售市场组织(Pareto)如何推动这些影响。为此，我们将开发新的理论，开发独特的越野扫描仪和最近才能获得的生产数据。我们将我们的项目分为四个工作包(WP)。WP1首先记录了各国、生产商和零售商之间价格异质性的事实，并试图确定受通胀影响最大的消费者类型。我们估计企业面临的不同成本冲击，如能源成本和税收的变化，如何转化为生产者和消费者价格。然后，我们问，是什么决定了这种成本向价格的转嫁，以及政策制定者如何利用这一信息来对抗通胀。WP2涉及生产者和零售商的市场力量，即他们影响市场价格并收取高于其平均成本的加价的能力。我们将分析在美国发现的加价增加是否也可以在欧洲观察到，以及它如何以及为什么在不同市场和不同级别的垂直链上存在差异。然后，我们研究向消费者披露额外信息的政策，例如关于零售产品的营养成分或生产者利润率，如何影响公司的市场力量。WP3有一个方法重点，涉及如何对多个商品单位或多个产品类别之间的相互依存关系进行建模的问题。在零售市场中，这些相互依赖是必不可少的，因为消费者通常在一家商店里进行大部分购买。我们将分析这些相互依存关系如何影响定价策略、零售商和生产商之间的利润分配，以及监管政策的影响。WP4以动态的视角分析零售商和产品的进入和退出，特别关注在线零售的兴起和不同国家硬性折扣店的进入。我们还研究了零售商和生产商、买方力量、兼并和买方群体之间的不同定价方案如何影响产品的进入和退出。家庭的通胀韧性关键取决于生产者-销售者网络以及消费者在价格上涨后调整消费的能力。

Consumers are currently affected by an unprecedented rise in inflation and this increase has been particularly severe in food and retail markets. This phenomenon relates to exogenous shocks, such as the COVID-19 crisis, but it may also respond to specific regulation or the exercise of market power at different levels of the retail chain. Not all countries and product markets are equally affected and this raises the question of why there exist heterogeneous effects. The goal of this project is to better document and understand this heterogeneity and to derive recommendations for economic policy. We focus on how the Producer And RETail market Organization (PARETO) in several product categories and countries drives these effects. For this purpose, we will develop novel theories and exploit unique cross-country scanner and production data that has only recently become available. We divide our project into four work packages (WP). WP1 starts by documenting facts about pricing heterogeneity across countries, producers and retailers and attempts to identify the type of consumers that have been most affected by inflation. We estimate how different cost shocks faced by firms, such as changes in energy costs and taxes, translate into producer and consumer prices. Then, we ask what determines this pass-through of costs to prices and how policy makers can use this information to fight inflation. WP2 deals with producers’ and retailers’ market power, i.e. their ability to influence market prices and charge markups above their average costs. We will analyze whether the increase in markups that has been found in the US can also be observed in Europe, how and why it varies across markets and different levels of the vertical chain. We then study how policies that reveal additional information to consumers, e.g. about the nutritional content of retail products or producer margins, affect firms’ market power. WP3 has a methodological focus and deals with the question of how interdependencies between multiple unit of goods or multiple product categories can be modelled. These interdependencies are essential in retail markets where consumers often conduct most of their purchases in a single store. We will analyze how these interdependencies affect pricing strategies, the division of profit between retailers and producers, as well as the impact of regulatory policies. WP4 takes a dynamic perspective and analyzes the entry and exit of retailers and products with a particular focus on the rise of online retailing and the entry of hard discounters in different countries. We also study how different pricing schemes between retailers and producers, buyer power, mergers and buyer groups affect product entry and exit. The inflation resilience of households crucially depends on the producer-seller network and the ability of consumers to adjust their consumption following a price increase.