Variation in Prices of Food Items in Jamaica: An Exploratory Analysis of Pricing Mechanisms of Supermarkets in Kingston
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15377/2409-9813.2014.01.02.2Keywords:
Food items, retail prices, Jamaica, price smoothing, supermarkets.Abstract
The Jamaica Agriculture Market Information System reports wide variations in the price of similar food items across supermarkets in the capital city, Kingston. Possible explanations for this phenomenon are explored in this paper. Our findings indicate that supermarkets that practice price smoothing are more likely to persistently sell food items at the highest price. Likewise, supermarkets that are centrally located are prone to consistently have the highest price for food items. Whether or not farmers who supply food items to the supermarkets and consumers who buy from them are sensitive to price smoothing will provide validation for this practice by supermarkets. This constitutes an area of future study.Downloads
References
Planning Institute of Jamaica. Economic and Social Survey of Jamaica 2007.
Planning Institute of Jamaica. Economic and Social Survey of Jamaica 2009.
Planning Institute of Jamaica. Economic and Social Survey of Jamaica 2013.
Abdulkadri AO, Ajibefun IA. An analysis of farm-retail spread for Jamaican fresh fruits. Paper presented at the Southern Agricultural Economics Association annual meeting Tulsa, OK. February 14-18: 14 pp. http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/34648/1/sp04ab02.pdf
Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. JAMIS Reporter Handbook Version 1.0, n.d.
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Copyright (c) 2015 Abdullahi O. Abdulkadri
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All the published articles are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (CC BY-NC 4.0) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
