The Paradox of the Shopping Mall: Costumers Flows and Market Efficiency

The Shopping Mall is in many countries a focus point for the lives of the people. It is the place where people go and shop, and in a certain sense it has become the modern equivalent of a square. Along the years, this attraction center has followed a definite evolutionary path, becoming wider, bigger, looking to maximize the comfort of the customers: a better place, for better sales. In this paper, we analyze the shopping mall under a different perspective, and check if this evolutionary line is in fact the best possible one, or if instead the mall could be shaped differently. We propose a structural modification of the mall (halving), and analyze its impact on the efficiency (the attractiveness of the shops). Counterintuitively, we find that this structural modification leads to a significant increase in the overall mall performance, a result that impacts the recent evolution of the mall, and that suggests that the mall as we know it might be far from being the best one, and some radical changes could be in order.