We compare the economic and econometric assumptions of two contemporary procedures for the estimation of markups, the stochastic frontier approach (SFA) and the production function approach (PFA), and apply them to EU food retailing over the period 2010–2018. Although, the estimates of the underlying technology of the two methods are similar, our results suggest that the PFA leads to significantly larger markups, yielding approximated excess consumer expenditures 58.14%–313.33% larger than predicted by the SFA. In addition, the correlation of markups between the two methods is low. This can have implications for the consistency of policy recommendations based on the SFA and the PFA as they yield different outcomes with respect to the state of competition in a market. Last, we find a link between market concentration and markups for the PFA pointing towards adverse effects of further concentration on consumer welfare, whereas our results show no evidence for a relationship between SFA markups and market concentration. [EconLit Citations: D22, D43, L11, L13, L81, Q18]

中文翻译：

---

加价估计：以欧洲食品零售商为例的当代方法比较

我们比较了两种当代加价估计程序的经济和计量经济学假设，即随机前沿法 (SFA) 和生产函数法 (PFA)，并将它们应用于 2010-2018 年期间的欧盟食品零售。尽管对这两种方法的基础技术的估计是相似的，但我们的结果表明，PFA 会导致明显更大的加价，产生的超额消费者支出比 SFA 预测的大约高 58.14%–313.33%。此外，两种方法之间的标记相关性较低。这可能会对基于 SFA 和 PFA 的政策建议的一致性产生影响，因为它们在市场竞争状态方面会产生不同的结果。最后的，我们发现市场集中度与 PFA 加价之间存在联系，表明进一步集中对消费者福利的不利影响，而我们的结果没有证据表明 SFA 加价与市场集中度之间存在关系。[EconLit 引文：D22、D43、L11、L13、L81、Q18]