An Empirical Analysis of Assortment Similarities Across U.S. Supermarkets
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines pairwise assortment similarities at U.S. supermarkets to understand how assortment composition and size are related to underlying factors that describe local store clientele, local competitive structure, and the retail outlets' characteristics. The top-selling items, which cumulatively make up 50% of sales, are sold at nearly every store, but other items are viewed as optional. We find that, within states, supermarkets owned by the same chain carry similar assortments and that the composition of their clientele and the presence of competing stores have effects on assortment similarity that are an order of magnitude smaller than ownership structure. In contrast, we find that, across states, supermarkets owned by the same chain do version their assortment. We explain this difference using extant work on the minimal efficient scale of supermarkets and on local demand effects. Furthermore, we investigate the distribution and role of regional brands. We find that regional brands are primarily distributed by small regional chains or independent stores. “Value” regional brands are primarily distributed by supermarket firms without store brands, whereas the distribution of “premium” regional brands is unrelated to the presence of store brands. We discuss our findings in the context of modeling assortment decisions and manufacturers designing distribution policies.
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.
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 | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it