Proximity to a Traditional Physical Store: The Effects of Mitigating Online Disutility Costs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine the implications of proximity to a physical store in offline–online retail competition where online disutility costs, which encompasses factors such as trust in the seller, returns, and after‐sales support, are important. Building on classical models, we consider a traditional retailer's expansion online, benefitting from the physical store's presence in serving customers online. Our innovation is to allow online disutility costs to be mitigated if the purchase is from a dual‐channel retailer, defining the mitigation as a function of proximity to the traditional store. Although expansion online is rarely profitable for traditional retailers, the expanded presence increases consumer welfare—which is further increased by competition from a pure e‐tailer. However, the competition between a pure e‐tailer and dual‐channel retailers can lower social welfare: in aggregate consumers may incur greater online disutility costs than transportation costs to obtain lower prices online. When online disutility costs are high and no pure e‐tailer is present, dual‐channel retailer prices and profits, in traditional stores and online, are greater than those where the market only has physical stores and a pure e‐tailer. Furthermore, consumer welfare is lower. Thus, consumers benefit from an expanded presence of traditional retailers online only when online disutility costs are low enough that mitigation matters. If online disutility costs are low, then their mitigation can result in higher social welfare in a market with only dual‐channel retailers. Similarly, the mitigation of online disutility costs can result in higher social welfare when dual‐channel retailers and a pure e‐tailer coexist.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".