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    The impact of price promotions on sales of unhealthy food and drink products in British retail stores

    Watt, Toby and Beckert, Walter and Smith, R. and Cornelsen, L. (2023) The impact of price promotions on sales of unhealthy food and drink products in British retail stores. Health Economics 32 (1), pp. 25-46. ISSN 1099-1050.

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    Abstract

    We study the health impact of food and beverage price promotion strategies – multi-buy offers and price discounts, typically biased towards unhealthy product categories – in British consumer retail. We are the first to employ econometric models from the marketing literature to analyse the impact of price promotions with a focus on population health. Our dynamic, reduced form demand model incorporates endogenous inventory (stock piling), consumption rates imputed from repeat purchases and allows for unobserved household heterogeneity. We find that removing price discounts is more effective for reducing purchase volume compared to removing multi-buy offers for 10 out of 12 food and drink groups, particularly those products for which price reduction is more common than multibuy. We find that price promotions induce consumption – and waste –through behavioural effects, associated with increased household inventory (stockpiling).

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Price promotion, food policy, obesity, nutrition, health economics
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Business and Law > Birkbeck Business School
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 07 Sep 2022 13:03
    Last Modified: 02 Oct 2023 00:10
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/49082

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