Analysis of Community Retail Market Area Delineation Techniques: an Application of GIS Technologies

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Abstract
Community development practitioners are often called upon to assist local merchants and community leaders to better understand their local retail markets. One set of tools many practitioners use is a family of gravity potential models to gather a sense of the spatial size and shape of the community's retail market. The most popular of these models is Reilly's Law of Retail Gravitation. Over the years, the family of gravity potential models, of which Reilly's is the simplest, has developed to the point where very realistic spatial representations of a market can be developed. Due to the computational intensity of these more complete models, they tend not to be used by community development practitioners. However, with the advent of new computer technologies, specifically geographic information systems (GIS), these computational barriers have been removed. The analysis reported here uses GIS technologies to compare and contrast Reilly's Law with Huff's probabilistic analysis. By using GIS as a tool, development practitioners can provide merchants and community leaders with a much more realistic representation of their retail market.

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