The Effects of Off-Price Store Opening on the Incumbent Channels of a Multichannel Retailer: Full-Line Stores Versus Online Store
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many high-end retailers operate off-price or discount versions of their full-line stores to engage value-conscious customers. In this study, the authors empirically examine the effects of a high-end retailer's opening of off-price stores on customer behavior. Leveraging a unique customer-level dataset spanning pre- and postopening periods of off-price stores in the United States by a multichannel retailer, the authors disentangle the effects of physical off-price store opening on the incumbent channels (full-line physical stores and online store) and document the underlying mechanisms. The authors employ the group-time treatment effects doubly robust estimator that exploits the staggered opening of multiple off-price stores. The authors find that off-price store opening decreases customer spending (substitution effect or value customer effect) at the full-line store and increases spending at the online store (complementarity effect or option-to-return-products effect). The authors report that the retailer's new customers (i.e., those acquired via the retailer's off-price stores) tend to spend less, return products at a higher rate, purchase lower-priced items, and are in the lower-income group. Furthermore, the regular customers who shop at the full-line stores of the upscale retailer spend less at and return their online purchases at a higher rate to the off-price stores than the value-conscious customers. The authors perform a battery of robustness checks to rule out effects of confounding factors. Based on the results, the authors offer new insights and implications for high-end multichannel retailers that adopt an off-price store opening strategy.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".