Sébastien Cerles will defend his dissertation, titled “Information and Pricing Strategies in Retail Markets,” supervised by Claire Chambolle and Marie-Laure Allain, on Wednesday, July 1, 2026, at 2:00 p.m., on the AgroParisTech campus, Building C, Room C2.0.37.
This dissertation studies how information and pricing strategies shape competition in retail markets. Retail markets are often analyzed as local markets, where consumers compare nearby stores and firms set prices market by market. While this is a useful benchmark, it overlooks two important features of retailing: consumers do not always observe all prices before choosing where to shop, and many retail chains set prices centrally and apply them uniformly across markets.
The first chapter studies price advertising by a multiproduct retailer when consumers have imperfect information. It shows how the choice of which price to advertise affects store visits, purchases across products, and consumer surplus.
The second chapter studies how uniform pricing affects retail merger simulations, using the U.S. yogurt market as an empirical application. It shows that uniform pricing changes both the level and the distribution of prices, and can spread merger-related price increases across markets.
The third chapter examines how uniform pricing affects merger remedies. It shows that, under uniform pricing, the best divestitures may not be those that target the markets where local competitive harm is highest, but rather those that most strongly affect the merged firm’s common pricing incentives.
Overall, the dissertation shows that retail pricing should not always be analyzed as a collection of independent local decisions. Information constraints link products within stores, while uniform pricing links markets across space. Taking these links into account can change the evaluation of information policies, mergers, and merger remedies.