Price Dynamics in Food Retailing in Great Britain

This project aims to use and extend a novel and remarkably comprehensive dataset on food retailing to analyse new questions regarding firms' pricing behaviour at a highly disaggregated level.
The analysis will be grounded in existing theoretical and empirical work but will extend beyond it to tackle policy-relevant issues in competition between firms and in the development of inflationary processes.
The central research questions to be examined include the following:

What was the impact of the major structural change resulting from the takeover of Safeway by Morrison on pricing behaviour and outcomes in the GB food retail market?
Is there evidence of prices having a leader-follower pattern amongst GB supermarkets?
If so, what are its causes and likely consequences?
Finally, and more broadly, how if at all do price movements in times when cost pressures are inflationary differ from those when cost pressures are relatively relaxed? If so, what are the implications?
The approach used will involve model building followed by econometric (statistical) analysis of five years' worth of weekly pricing data across four major supermarket chains for a significant number of products, alongside other information on the products and the firms involved.