Effects of Product Categories on Consumers’ Spending in Multiple Retail Formats: An Abstract

In this study, we propose a multivariate tobit model to examine the effects of different types of frequently purchase products on consumers’ spending in retail formats. There is a rich marketing literature that studies the determinants of consumers’ purchases in the stores that belong to the same retail format (e.g., Bell & Lattin, 1998; Bodapati & Srinivasan, 2006; Briesch, Chintagunta, & Fox, 2009). However, there is little empirical research that addresses the issue of consumers’ patronage for retail formats. Among the few studies that explicitly model consumers’ retail format patronage behavior (e.g., Bhatnagar & Ratchford, 2004; Fox, Montgomery, & Lodish, 2004), the focus has been on the impact of overall store characteristics, such as store price and assortment indices, which are constructed based on information of a number of categories, to represent the attractiveness of a shopping basket of a consumer.