Marketing Analytics Centre Working Paper Series
The Marketing Analytics Centre (MAC) seeks to advance knowledge and address consequential marketing problems that affect organizations, markets, the economy, and society by integrating rigorous theory with data, analytics, and emerging technologies. The Centre brings together researchers across disciplines, institutions, and sectors to develop new ideas, pursue collaborative research, and deepen our understanding of a rapidly changing marketing landscape.
The MAC Working Paper Series provides a forum for sharing emerging research by scholars affiliated with the Centre. By circulating ongoing work and early findings, the Series seeks to foster scholarly exchange, stimulate new research questions and collaborations, and contribute to the development of research at the intersection of marketing, data, analytics, and emerging technologies.
Working papers represent research in progress. Many are at different stages of peer review and may be revised as the research develops. Citation terms are provided with individual papers.
We invite you to browse the abstracts and engage with the research. To request a copy of a paper, please contact lang.mac@uoguelph.ca.
Working Papers
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MAC.2026.001
National Culture, Brand Positioning, and 9-Ending Pricing Across Markets
- Central Connecticut State University — School of Business
- University of Guelph — Department of Marketing & Consumer Studies, Gordon S. Lang School of Business & Economics
- Central Connecticut State University — School of Business
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Abstract
In this paper we study multinational retailers’ 9-ending usage across global markets and how they vary with national cultural dimensions. Using directly observed daily online prices from four multinational retailers during 2008–2013, covering nearly 120,000 products across technology, apparel, and home-furnishings categories in 61 countries, we find that uncertainty avoidance (UAI) and long-term orientation (LTO) are negatively associated with 9-ending usage, whereas individualism (IDV) is positively associated with it. We also find the Culture–9-ending associations differ by brand positioning and are generally stronger for the premium-oriented focal brand than for the value-oriented brands. Supplementary analyses show different patterns for 8- and 5-endings. To the best of our knowledge, the study provides the widest country coverage in cross-cultural price-ending research to date. It links national cultural dimensions to 9-ending usage, identifies brand positioning as a boundary condition, and extends the standardization-adaptation discussion to a highly codifiable element of multinational retail pricing.
Keywords
price endings; 9-ending pricing; national culture; brand positioning; multinational retailing; standardization-adaptation
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MAC.2026.002
Retail Price Ripples
- Central Connecticut State University — School of Business
- University of Guelph — Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics
- Bar-Ilan University — Department of Economics; Emory University; ICEA, Wilfrid Laurier University; ISET at Tbilisi State University; RCEA, University of Bologna
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Abstract
Much like small ripples in a stream, which get lost in the larger waves, small changes in retail prices often fly under the radar of public perceptions, while large price changes appear as marketing moves associated with demand and competition. Unnoticed, these could increase consumers’ out-of-pocket expenses. Indeed, retailers could boost their profits by making numerous small price increases or by obfuscating large price increases with numerous small price decreases, thereby bypassing the consumer’s full attention and consideration, and triggering consumer fairness concerns. Yet only a handful of papers study small price changes. Extant results are often based on a single retailer, limited products, short time span, and legacy datasets dating back to the 1980s and 1990s — leaving their current practical relevance questionable. Researchers have also questioned whether the reported observations of small price changes are artifacts of measurement errors driven by data aggregation. In a series of analyses of a large dataset (almost 79 billion weekly price observations from 2006 to 2015, covering 527 products, and about 35,000 stores across 161 retailers), we find robust evidence of asymmetric pricing in the small (APIS), where small price increases outnumber small price decreases, but no such asymmetry is present in the large. We also document the reverse phenomenon (APIS-R), where small price decreases outnumber small price increases. Our results are robust to several possible measurement issues. Importantly, our findings indicate a greater current relevance and generalizability of such asymmetric pricing practices than the existing literature recognizes.
Keywords
Asymmetric price adjustment; asymmetric pricing; small price changes; small price increases; small price decreases; consumer inattention; strategic obfuscation; profitability; pricing strategy; pricing tactics; inflation
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MAC.2026.003
Is Channel Conflict Bad for Business? A Competency-Based Theory and Empirical Evidence
- Laurentian University — Faculty of Management
- University of Guelph — Department of Marketing and Consumer Studies, Lang School of Business and Economics
- University of Graz — Department of Marketing
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Abstract
The impact of conflict between marketing channel partners is often traced to the transaction costs of dealing with the feuds and linked negatively to business performance. However, is such channel conflict really bad for business? We contend that it is not so and that conflict’s net impact on business performance is nuanced. Channel conflicts are opportunities to learn which trigger myriad bilateral remedial adaptations, benefiting the partnerships. This tension between the deadweight loss of transaction costs and the advantage of learning means that the net impact of conflict will depend on the firms’ competencies to benefit from learning and to keep the transaction costs from escalating. We incorporate these in our theory and test the propositions using data from a panel of 513 franchise firms over six years (2010–2015). Our data comprises information on litigation, franchise contract terms, and revenue extracted from Franchise Disclosure Documents (FDD), Entrepreneur Magazine, and Franchise Times rankings. We find that the negative impact of conflict is only true above a threshold level of conflict. At lower levels, conflict is associated with improved business performance — thus, an inverted U-shaped conflict-performance relationship. Consistent with the propositions, firm competencies reflected in the age and size of the firm, moderate the conflict-performance curve, shifting the apex to the right and flattening/steepening the slopes predictably. Our results are robust to different model specifications, measures of performance, and endogeneity considerations. For managers, the results indicate how certain competencies are critical to designing resilient marketing channels.
Keywords
Channel conflict; firm performance; learning; transaction costs; firm competency; inverted U-shaped relationship
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MAC.2026.004
Who’s Your Neighbor? Measurement and Implications of Retail Agglomeration
- University of Guelph — Department of Marketing and Consumer Studies, Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics
- University of Connecticut — School of Business
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Abstract
Retail agglomeration effects are difficult to measure due to possible reverse causality and the need to decompose agglomeration into traffic and spillover effects. In this paper we develop a new method to measure retail agglomeration in the grocery product context by exploiting consumer visits to non-grocery store formats. The seasonal variation in these non-grocery store visits contrasts sharply with the perennial and predictable nature of grocery visits. This variation enables us to establish a causal link between non-grocery visits and grocery visits and to measure the spillover effects of non-grocery visits on grocery store choice probability. We measure agglomeration effects of 13%. Our method also enables the measurement of increase in catchment area for a grocery store due to proximal location with other store formats. We find that increase in catchment area ranges from about 2.5 miles for big box and home improvement stores to 3.9 miles for toy stores, and discuss managerial implications for retailers of this method.
Keywords
Retail agglomeration; retail competition; spillover; traffic; hierarchical Bayes; causality; endogeneity
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MAC.2026.005
More Dollars but Dissatisfied Customers: On the Paradox of Intrabrand Agglomeration
- Toronto Metropolitan University — Ted Rogers School of Management
- University of Guelph — Lang School of Business and Economics
- Iowa State University — Ivy College of Business
Under review. Please do not cite without author permission.
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Abstract
Cities increasingly host many stores of the same brand, making intrabrand agglomeration a central question for marketing. We propose customer variety seeking as the central mechanism linking intrabrand agglomeration to store performance, developing a framework in which high intrabrand agglomeration suppresses variety seeking, which in turn generates opposing effects on two store performance outcomes: store sales and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the effect of intrabrand agglomeration varies with two local market conditions: interbrand agglomeration and relative service intensity. Using an industry-wide panel of 33,382 U.S. pizza chain restaurants from 72 brands and a behavioral co-visitation measure of variety seeking drawn from foot traffic data, we find that high intrabrand agglomeration suppresses variety seeking, which in turn raises store sales but dampens customer satisfaction. A particularly counterintuitive finding emerges: high interbrand agglomeration amplifies, rather than buffers, the negative effect of intrabrand agglomeration on variety seeking. In contrast, greater relative service intensity attenuates the negative effect of intrabrand agglomeration on variety seeking, buffering the performance paradox. The study advances agglomeration research by placing variety seeking, a demand-side mechanism, at the center of agglomeration theory, uncovering a counterintuitive amplification effect of interbrand agglomeration, and introducing relative service intensity as a boundary condition.
Keywords
Intrabrand agglomeration; variety seeking; store sales; customer satisfaction; interbrand agglomeration; relative service intensity
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MAC.2026.006
How and Why Does Shoplifting in the Vicinity of a Retail Store Affect Its Sales Growth?
- Binghamton University — School of Management
- Toronto Metropolitan University — Ted Rogers School of Management
- University of Guelph — Lang School of Business and Economics
Under review. Please do not cite without author permission.
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Abstract
Shoplifting imposes well-documented operational costs on retailers, yet its effects on store-level sales performance remain unquantified. This gap matters: if shoplifting deters shoppers, its economic burden extends far beyond inventory shrinkage. We examine whether shoplifting incidents in a retail store’s vicinity affect its sales growth, under what conditions, and through what mechanisms. We propose a sequential demand-side pathway: shoplifting elevates shoppers’ safety concerns, reducing shopper traffic, and suppressing sales growth. The Routine Activity Theory proposes two store characteristics that can mitigate this negative effect. First, the store’s offline revenue share generates internal guardianship through heightened staff presence and physical monitoring. Second, temporal agglomeration generates external guardianship through co-present shoppers across neighboring stores during shared consumption windows. The empirical analysis uses a store-month panel of 70,330 branded retail stores across 27 U.S. cities from January 2019 through January 2026, drawing on 495,973 shoplifting incidents. Results confirm that shoplifting significantly reduces store sales growth. At the median store, local shoplifting is associated with a monthly sales loss of 36% of median monthly store sales and an annualized aggregate loss exceeding $2.15 billion. Stores with higher offline revenue share or greater temporal agglomeration experience meaningfully smaller reductions. Shopper traffic mediates approximately 59% of the total effect, confirming demand-side deterrence as a pathway. The evidence contributes to retail literature by documenting how and why shoplifting affects a store’s performance. We offer managers two levers to mitigate this effect.
Keywords
Shoplifting; store sales growth; shopper traffic; routine activity theory; guardianship; offline revenue share; temporal agglomeration
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MAC.2026.007
When the Anchor Closes: Walmart Store Closures and Nearby Retail Activity
- Binghamton University — School of Management
- Toronto Metropolitan University — Ted Rogers School of Management
- University of Guelph — Lang School of Business and Economics
Under review. Please do not cite without author permission.
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Abstract
Anchor stores occupy a dual role in local retail markets: they compete with nearby businesses for consumer spending while also attracting shoppers whose visits generate demand spillovers for surrounding establishments. Therefore, an anchor’s closure produces two countervailing effects — competitive relief and agglomeration loss — making its net effect on nearby stores theoretically ambiguous. We examine this question using 39 Walmart store closures across 20 U.S. states between 2019 and 2026. Following a Walmart closure, nearby stores experience an estimated 15.20% decline in monthly shopper traffic and a 14.04% decline in monthly sales revenue relative to stores near surviving Walmart anchors. The effects become increasingly negative after closure and remain stable across a battery of robustness checks. These findings indicate that, on average, the loss of anchor-generated traffic outweighs the benefits nearby stores receive from reduced competition and are consistent with agglomeration loss as the dominant mechanism. We provide indirect evidence on this interpretation. The postclosure sales effect is 17.90% more favorable for competing than noncompeting stores and 16.50% more favorable for branded than unbranded stores; however, both comparisons remain consistent with net losses rather than a reversal of the average effect. Lastly, greater preclosure intrabrand clustering and online revenue share are associated with more favorable postclosure sales effects. These findings suggest how managerial actions can mitigate the effects of closure. The research contributes by demonstrating that an anchor store’s exit can contract economic activity throughout the surrounding retail area rather than simply redistribute the exiting store’s demand to nearby businesses.
Keywords
Anchor stores; store closure; retail agglomeration; digital channel; competitive relief; shopper traffic; Walmart; difference-in-differences
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MAC.2026.008
Robotic Pets as Resources: Transforming the Lives of the Unseen and Overlooked
- University of Guelph
- Deakin University
- University of Melbourne
- Monash University
- Monash University
- Austin Health
Revised version forthcoming in the Journal of Business Research.
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Abstract
Older people often feel “invisible” in society, experiencing vulnerability due to restricted resources and diminished control. Their loved ones may also experience a spillover of this vulnerability. This study investigates robotic pets (robopets) as artificial intelligence–enabled resources that can enhance well-being for both groups. Automated text analysis of online customer reviews across four reviewer segments reveals that robopets’ visual and tactile features enhance their perceived realism. This realism, alongside beneficiary attachment and prior pet ownership, positively relates to online ratings and beneficiary well-being. Qualitative analysis shows that robopets reduce vulnerability by restoring beneficiaries’ capacity to care for something while helping loved ones manage difficult emotions. Studying lived experiences of robopet ownership transcends the typically temporary consumer–robopet interactions depicted in prior research. Our findings inform the design and marketing of robopets to those experiencing vulnerability. Ultimately, we provide evidence that robopets can enhance quality of life for older “invisibles” and those who care for them.
Keywords
Companion robots; robotic pets; vulnerability; well-being; transformer models; buyer-based segmentation