An Economic Model of the Evolution of Food Retail and Supply Chains from Traditional Shops to Supermarkets to E‐Commerce
构建了一个商店选择均衡模型，分析消费者特征（收入、口味、出行成本）和商店成本结构（上游价格、易腐品供应链成本、仓储成本）如何决定传统商店、超市和电子商务在不同时间和地点的共存与主导地位，并说明不同商品（干货与易腐品）由哪类零售商分销。
Abstract Food retail has been in continuous evolution for the past century—both in developing and developed countries—from local traditional stores to supermarkets to e‐commerce. In this paper we analyze the evolution of food retail by building a store choice equilibrium model and providing an illustrated discussion. The patterns in retail in any given time and place of different types of stores (such as traditional shops, supermarkets, and online e‐commerce) depend on two main factors. The first are consumers’ characteristics such as income, tastes, and travel costs of going to different stores and/or shipping costs if purchasing online. The second are the stores’ cost structures, which include item costs from upstream producers, the costs of procurement supply chains (beyond the cost of the item) for perishable items, and the costs of in‐store storage. We show under what conditions in equilibrium the different retail types exist and which can become dominant, and what types of goods (dry packaged foods versus perishables) are distributed by what type of retailers.