The thesis is a collection of three essays on retail competition that are relevant to both the theory and practice of marketing. Essay 1, examines the role of price and category assortment on competition between EDLP (Every Day Low Price) format and HILO (Promotion) format retail stores. Policy experiments are conducted to study the strategic implications of 1) retail assortment reduction and 2) customized (household specific) coupons. The empirical analysis is conducted using a) household and store level scanner data and b) combination of hierarchical Bayes and classical estimation techniques.

Essay 2, models the price and geographic location elements of consumer demand, firm costs and competition in the lodging industry. A new demand model (Heterogeneous Aggregate Generalized Nested Logit) is introduced. The essay demonstrates the role of geographic location as an important element of retailers? marketing mix. Essay 3, proposes an empirical framework for long-run discrete dynamic games to study market firm?s entry, stay, and exit decisions in the lodging market. The econometric model is based on Markov perfect equilibrium concept and relies on dynamic programming computational techniques. Essays 2 and 3 use aggregate data and classical estimation techniques to recover the underlying structural parameters.