Understanding Consumer Reactions to Assortment Unavailability

At the end of our sample, the effect of the delisting remains rather negative, though again only
significant at a .10 level. Thus, we only find weak evidence for a long-term sales effect of the
assortment reduction among former category buyers of delisted items. 18
Figure 4.4: Effect of the size of delisting on detergent category sales, split into sales change
due to delisting for former buyers and former nonbuyers (95% confidence bounds)
0.25
0.00
-0.25
0.2
0.0
-0.2
-0.4
Additional sales change in test stores g(t|θ)
2003
Additional sales change for former buyers in test store k (t|ν )
2003
4.5.3 Analysis 3: Sales of new category buyers
In this analysis, we only consider new category buyers, those who purchased detergents only
after the assortment reduction and not in the weeks before the assortment reduction. We note,
however, that the term “new category buyer” is not totally justified, in that our observation
period before the assortment reduction on which we base our grouping is only 26 weeks. Thus,
our subsample of new buyers may also include some households that buy detergent very
18 Following Boatwright and Nunes (2001), we performed a further decomposition by investigating sales effect
differences between former category buyers of delisted brands and former category buyers of delisted items. Our
results do not show any significant differences between these two groups of former category buyers, in contrast with
the findings of Boatwright and Nunes (2001), who report different effects.
110