Competition in Large Markets
This paper evaluates the simplifying assumption that producers compete in a large
market without substantial strategic interactions using nonparametric regressions of
producers’ choices on market size. With such atomistic competition, increasing the
number of consumers leaves the distributions of producers’ prices and other choices
unchanged. In many models featuring non-trivial strategic considerations, producers’
prices fall as their numbers increase. I examine observations of restaurants’ sales, seating
capacities, exit decisions, and prices from 222 U.S. cities. Given factor prices and
demographic variables, increasing a city’s size increases restaurants’ average sales and
decreases their exit rate and prices. These results suggest that strategic considerations
lie at the heart of restaurant pricing and turnover.