Wal-Mart's Impact on Supplier Profits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous academic research on the expansion of dominant retailers such as Wal-Mart has examined implications for incumbent retailers, consumers, and the local community. Little is known, however, about Wal-Mart's influence on suppliers' performance. Manufacturers suggest that Wal-Mart uses its power to squeeze their profits. In this article, the authors study the validity of this claim. They investigate the underlying mechanisms that may cause changes in manufacturer profits following Wal-Mart market entry. The data contain information on supplier interactions with retail stores, including Wal-Mart, for a period of five years. They find that postentry supplier profits increased by 18% on average, whereas profits derived from incumbent retailers decreased only marginally. Their results show that wholesale prices are not the main driver of postentry supplier profit changes; market expansion is. They observe a significant increase in shipments to 50% of markets studied. Furthermore, their analyses demonstrate that supplier shipment and profit increases are highest for markets in which incumbents offer a wide variety of products and carry items that Wal-Mart does not sell.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".