It is beyond doubt that location selection plays a vital role in retailing. Even though the reasons upon which customers base their destination choice are well investigated, there are only few studies considering a retailer's location selection process. Moreover, most of them look either at a subset of location factors or don't examine the perceived relevance to a retailer's location decision. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore in what way retail location factors influence the attractiveness of a prospective site from a retailer's point of view. Therefore, a comprehensive catalogue of relevant location determinants was developed based on a systematic literature review. The final catalogue has been operationalised by drawing on qualitative data from expert interviews in order to implement it in the applied Hierarchical-Individualised-Limit-Conjoint-Analysis (HILCA). Then, a quantitative questionnaire survey was conducted amongst food retailers in the German-speaking area to determine the weight of each factor in location decisions using HILCA. The empirical results provide evidence that other factors besides the well-known (e.g. population density, competition conditions or assumed catchment area) have notable influence on the retailer's location decision. (author's abstract)

(no abstract available) / Series: SRE - Discussion Papers

Economides (1986) has shown that within a linear city an equilibrium exists in a two-stage location-price game when the curvature of the transportation cost function is sufficiently high. One important point is that not all of these equilibria are at maximal differentiation. In this paper we include an additional stage with decentralized wage bargaining. This intensifies price competition resulting in locations that are nearer to the extremes of the city. The magnitude of this effect depends on the bargaining power of the unions. (author's abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

New Economic Geography (NEG) models do not typically account for the presence of regions other than the ones involved in the integration process. We explore such a possibility in a Footloose Entrepreneur (FE) model aiming at studying the stability properties of long-run industrial location equilibria. We consider a world economy composed by a customs union of two regions (regions 1 and 2) and an "outside region" which can be regarded as the rest of the world (region 3). The effects of economic integration on industrial agglomeration within the customs union are studied under the assumption of a constant distance between the customs union itself and the third region. The results show that higher economic integration does not always implies the standard result of full agglomeration of FE models. This incomplete agglomeration outcome is due to the fact that the periphery region keeps a share of industrial activities in order to satisfy a share of "external demand". That is, the deindustrialization process brought about by economic integration in the periphery of the union is mitigated by the demand of consumers living in the rest of the world. In general, the market size of the third region affects the number of the long-run equilibria, as well as their stability properties. In addition to the standard outcomes of FE models, we describe the existence of two asymmetric equilibria characterised by unequal distribution of firms between regions 1 and 2, with no full agglomeration though. Interestingly, these equilibria are stable and therefore can be regarded as a likely long-run equilibrium state of the economy. (author's abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series