Evaluation of Competition among Production Areas in a Fruit and Vegetable Wholesale Market with a Mixture of Heterogeneous Buyers

This study proposes a method to grasp the actual state of producing area brand differentiation in the fruit and vegetable wholesale market where heterogeneous actual users have come to coexist.The features of this approach are as follows: (1) parallelism is assumed in the evaluation differences and the price differences between producing area brands during the evaluation period, (2) a multi-attribute evaluation function is estimated using a dominance type analytic hierarchy process for each type of actual user, and (3) weights are assigned to heterogeneous actual users from published pooled market data of price differences between producing area brands.Using these weights, the positioning of production area brands in a characteristic space where the scale is common to unit price can be clarified and the horizontal and vertical differentiation between production area brands for heterogeneous actual users visualized.