Producer and Retail Market Organization

Our team is currently part of an international project looking at producer and retail market organization. The project is implemented together with colleagues from INRAE (Paris Saclay) and the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics. It has received funding from the German Science Foundation and the French National Research Agency.

The project in a nutshell: Consumers are currently affected by an unprecedented rise in inflation and this increase has been particularly severe in food and retail markets. Exogenous shocks, such as COVID-19 and armed conflicts, are potential causes of increasing prices, but they may also be driven by specific regulation or the exercise of market power at different levels of the retail chain. Not all countries and product markets are affected equally, which raises questions regarding the source of this heterogeneity in market responses. The goal of this project is to document this process, understand its causes and support evidence-based economic policy. We focus on the role of Producer And RETail market Organization (PARETO) in shaping the economic environment. For this purpose, we will develop novel theories and exploit new, unique cross-country scanner and production datasets covering consumers, producers, and retailers in 17 European countries. The current project aims to push the research frontier of theoretical and empirical work in the field of industrial organization of producer and retail markets.