The tragedy of local service shortage in cities – a willingness to pay study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The transformation of the grocery retailing business witnessed in many countries during the last decades has resulted in sparser retailing networks, wherein fi rm effi ciency has improved at the expense of store proximity.This process is welfare enhancing in most cases, but one potential source of market failure remains to be explored.There might exist a degenerative process, caused by uncoordinated individual interaction, creating unmatched demand for local service.The purpose of this paper is to test if local grocery retailing service is a utility plagued by a social dilemma.When a social dilemma is at hand, each individual realises that the impact of his/her choices is too small to make a difference, if others cannot be trusted to act in the same manner.Under this hypothesis, more local service would be observed if individual actions could be coordinated.In a stated preference study, more than 2000 respondents have stated how they would distribute their grocery purchases between a local store 300 m from their homes and a larger, but cheaper, store 10 km away.In a fi rst scenario they do this under the condition that their choice does not affect the existence or design of any of the two stores.This mirrors the realistic case with uncoordinated decisions and negligible individual infl uence.In a second scenario, the respondents make the same choice but are now informed that the share they buy in the small store will affect the price level and ultimately the survival of the small store.In this way we mimic a case where individuals could trust each other and make short-term sacrifi ces for a long-term benefi t.Based on the answers we estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) for local grocery service.It is found that WTP would be higher if the shopping behaviour could be coordinated.With some sort of binding agreement between the customers, the local store would survive and offer better service and more favourable lower prices than if people act independently.A policy recommendation is to support local grocery stores, not by direct regulations, but through a transport system and a land use pattern that makes local service more favourable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".