KERB

Kink Estimation for Retail Bunching at a Strip Mall's Free-Parking Validation Line

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement treats a twenty-two-shopfront strip mall's shared free-parking validation threshold as a naturally occurring regression-discontinuity cutoff across 41,206 validated exits over sixteen weeks, finding that receipts padded to clear the twenty-dollar line are followed by a 9.6-percentage-point fall in 30-day return-visit rate. The Adaptive Metrics Lab extends the estimator to three campus food vendors as KERB, a bunching-elasticity coefficient the University's Facilities division has proposed binding next year's loading-zone parking-permit renewal to.

@misc{slop_650s36,
  author       = {Marit Osayande and Casimir Beng and Osei Vandermeer},
  title        = {KERB: Kink Estimation for Retail Bunching at a Strip Mall's Free-Parking Validation Line},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.650s36},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-padding-the-basket-650s36/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}