Retail Intermediation and Local Foods
研究消费者偏好将本地食品与非本地食品一起购买，解释了本地食品通过传统零售商销售快速增长的原因，对零售商和农业政策制定者有参考价值。
Abstract Direct sales of local foods, for instance through farmer's markets, have reached a plateau, while intermediated sales (through more traditional retailers) are still rising rapidly. We provide an explanation for the growth of intermediated local foods based on the observation that consumers prefer to buy local foods as part of a shopping basket that includes both local and non‐local items. We test our hypothesis using data from a natural experiment conducted by Relay Foods, an online retailer based in the U.S. state of Virginia, and a multi‐variate logit model of shopping‐basket demand. We find significant complementarities among items in a sample shopping basket that are not reflected in estimates from a discrete‐choice model of category demand. Estimates of a structural pricing‐and‐local‐content model reveal important incentives for retailers to offer local foods as part of a broader selection of grocery items.