TY  - JOUR
AU  - Basker, Emek
TI  - Raising the Barcode Scanner: Technology and Productivity in the Retail Sector
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17825
PY  - 2012
Y2  - February 2012
DO  - 10.3386/w17825
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17825
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17825.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Emek Basker
US Census Bureau
Center for Economic Studies
4600 Silver Hill Road
Washington, DC 20233-9100
E-Mail: emek@emekbasker.org
M1  - published as Emek Basker. "Raising the Barcode Scanner: Technology and Productivity in the Retail Sector," in Timothy Simcoe, Ajay K. Agrawal, and Stuart Graham, organizers, "Standards, Patents and Innovations" International Journal of Industrial Organization, Volume 36 (2014)

M3  - presented at "Patents, Standards and Innovation Conference", January 20-21, 2012
AB  - Barcodes and barcode scanners transformed the grocery industry in the 1970s. I use store-level data from the 1972, 1977, and 1982 Census of Retail Trade, matched to data on store scanner installations, to estimate scanners' effect on labor productivity. I find that early scanners increased a store's labor productivity, on average, by approximately 4.5 percent in the first few years. The effect was larger in stores carrying more packaged products, consistent with the presence of network externalities. Short-run gains were small relative to fixed costs, suggesting that the impediment to widespread adoption of the new technology was profitability, not coordination problems.
ER  -