TY  - BOOK
AU  - Illanes,Gastón
AU  - Moshary,Sarah
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Market Structure and Product Assortment: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Liquor Licensure 
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2020///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - April 2020; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - We examine how market structure, measured as the number of firms, affects prices, quantities, product assortment, and consumer surplus. Our analysis exploits Washington's deregulation of spirit sales, which generated exogenous variation in market structure across the state. Consistent with the uniform pricing literature, we find no effect of increased competition on prices. Rather, we document an expansion of product assortment, which in turn increases purchasing. Using a discrete-choice demand model, we estimate that wider assortments increase consumer surplus by $3.20/month when moving from monopoly to duopoly. However, the likelihood that a household engages in heavy drinking, as defined by the CDC, increases by 5.6 percentage points, raising concerns about social welfare
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w27016
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w27016
ER  -