IKEA: product, pricing, and pass-through

Abstract

With over 300 stores in 40 countries, IKEA is a major international presence in retail housewares and furnishings. IKEA publishes country-specific catalogs with local-currency prices guaranteed to hold for 1 year. This paper explores a new dataset of IKEA products and catalog prices covering six countries for the time period 1994-2010. The dataset, with over 140,000 observations, is uniquely poised to shed light on the way in which a large multinational retailer operates in a setting characterized by a very large number of goods, distributed and priced in many countries. Thus, the goal of this paper is to document the choices made by IKEA in several related decision areas. In doing so, this paper provides evidence against which existing theories can be evaluated and revised in the light of this new information.