PRODUCT QUALITY AND MARKET SIZE*

Abstract

Do larger markets offer better products? The question has implications for theories of cities and theories of market organization. We document that in the restaurant industry, where quality is produced largely with variable costs, the range of qualities on offer increases in market size. In daily newspapers, where quality is produced with fixed costs, the average quality of products increases with market size, but the market does not offer much additional variety as it grows large. These results are consistent with IO theories of endogenous product quality and with theories that emphasize the consumption advantages of cities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 216 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.