An experimental study of price dispersion

We report an experiment examining a simple clearinghouse model that generates price dispersion. According to this model, price dispersion arises because of consumer heterogeneity—some consumers are “informed” and simply buy from the firm offering the lowest price, while the remaining consumers are “captive” and shop based on considerations other than price. In our experiment we observe substantial and persistent price dispersion. We find that, as predicted, an increase in the fraction of informed consumers leads to more competitive pricing for all consumers. We also find, as predicted, that when more firms enter the market, prices to informed consumers become more competitive while prices to captive customers become less competitive. Thus, our experiment provides strong support for the model's comparative static predictions about how changes in market structure affect pricing.     

双参考价格范围的价格判断试验研究

传统的价格判断模型考虑常规目标价格状态的判断,然而在不规范的市场中,商品良莠不齐,消费者常常面对超低的商品价格,按照传统的价格判断模型,消费者不会接受这种超低价,然而现实情况却不是如此。消费者为什么接受了怀疑的交易,面对超低价格,消费者如何判断价格的吸引力?笔者将对传统价格模型进行扩展,通过试验验证新的价格判断模型,用以解释以上问题。     

The distribution of demand, market structure, and investment in technology

In a quality-ladder growth model, the dispersion in the demand for quality influences the prices innovators may charge for their innovations and the number of such firms that may obtain market shares at any one time. Under a more dispersed distribution, the innovator may only charge a lower price to cover the entire market. The payoff to innovation declines, causing investment to fall. When the dispersion has reached a critical level, the innovator will no longer price out the incumbents, turning the market into a natural oligopoly with firms selling different grades co-existing at any one time, even if it is optimal for all consumers to buy the highest grade available. Any further increases in dispersion raise the payoff to innovation, inducing greater investment.     

An analysis of asymmetric demand response to price changes: The case of local telephone calls

Asymmetric demand responses to price changes are not an observable implication of classical demand theory, which predicts that consumers will react to a small price increase in much the same way as they do to a small price decrease. Yet applied researchers have long speculated that consumers are more sensitive to price increases than they are to price decreases. In addition, recent empirical studies generally support the theory of asymmetric demand responses. We construct a dynamic model based on data gathered from monthly telephone bills for 128 New York Telephone customers over a five-year period. Our results support the conclusion that customers react more quickly and strongly when prices go up than they do when prices go down.We would like to thank Manny Haas and Bernie Reddy for their comments and suggestions.     

Home bias, distribution services and determinants of real exchange rates

This paper examines empirically how exogenous changes in the terms of trade affect the real exchange rate through the relative price of traded goods with Canada–US data. The relative price of traded goods is constructed using prices at the dock and retail prices. The first measure emphasizes the importance of home bias in consumption of traded goods. The second measure highlights the importance of distribution services required for consumption of traded goods. It is found that terms of trade shocks affect the relative price of traded goods using both measures. A possible interpretation of empirical findings is that home bias and distribution services are important for understanding the relative price of traded goods.     

Modelling Sri Lankan consumption patterns using error corrected LA-AIDS

Static-demand systems used in empirical studies are based on the assumption that consumers immediately and fully adjust to a new equilibrium when either incomes or prices change. In reality, consumers are unlikely to have adjusted to equilibrium in each time period and the assumption of instantaneous adjustments by consumers is potentially incorrect. The dynamic modelling approach allows for intertemporal rationality of consumer behaviour by explicitly considering the mechanism underlying the short-run adjustment process. This study, while considering the traditional static Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS), in addition, considers two dynamic versions of the AIDS to model the dynamic behaviour of Sri Lankan consumers in consuming eight broad commodity groups using data during the period 1963–2016. The estimated results indicate that all commodities have price inelastic demand in both the short and long run. The differences between short- and long-run demand elasticities indicate the need to adopt a dynamic approach in estimating demand elasticities, because the income and price elasticities are key inputs for policy analysis in economy-wide modelling.     

Price adjustment in an atomistic market

This paper considers the price adjustment process in a market which retains the characteristics of a perfectly competitive market except that individual firms are price-setters. Buyers, unaware initially of what prices which firms are charging, indulge in search by contacting a sample of firms and buy (according to a demand curve) from the lowest-price firm encountered. Firms set prices to maximise profits over their perceived (or estimated) demand curve, and update their estimated demand curve in accordance with the observed change in demand between successive time periods. It is shown that the price distribution converges to a degenerate distribution centred on the monopoly price.     

Public pricing of final and intermediate goods in the presence of externalities

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of externalities on pricing decisions by a public or a private regulated firm selling both final and intermediate goods. The externalities generate feedbacks in demand that affect both consumers and producers. The model is very general in that it does not impose constant returns to scale on private production, allows for distributional effects of both the publicly determined prices and private sector profits, and captures the general equilibrium effects of public pricing. Socially optimal pricing rules are derived, and the relation of the results with previous models of pricing in the presence of externalities is investigated.     

THE INCOME DISTRIBUTION EFFECTS OF A NATURAL GAS PRICE INCREASE

Deregulation of wellhead natural gas prices will affect individuals as consumers and resource owners. It is shown that higher natural gas prices will be roughly progressive with respect to household and general consumers. The effects on the distribution of resource earnings will be ambiguous because although the oil and gas industry is highly capital intensive, natural gas price deregulation will likely cause reduced spending on other capital-intensive activities, including deep drilling for high cost gas, gas utility distribution, and exports. Overall, no clear case can be made that gas wellhead price deregulation will be regressive     

RETAIL PRICE REGULATION AND THE OPTION TO DELAY

ABSTRACT ** :  This paper examines a two-period model of an investment decision in a network industry characterized by demand uncertainty, economies of scale and sunk costs. In the absence of regulation we identify the market conditions under which a monopolist decides to invest early as well as the underlying overall welfare output. In a regulated environment, we consider a monopolist who faces no downstream (final good) competition but is subject to retail price regulation. We identify the welfare-maximizing regulated prices when the unregulated market outcome is set as the benchmark. We show that if the regulator can commit to ex post regulation – that is, regulated prices that are contingent to future demand realization – then regulated prices that allow the firm to recover its total costs of production are welfare-maximizing. Thus, under ex post price regulation there is no need to compensate the regulated firm for the option to delay that it foregoes when investing today. We argue, however, that regulators cannot make this type of commitment and, therefore, price regulation is often ex ante – that is, regulated prices are not contingent to future demand. We show that the optimal ex ante regulation, and the extent to which regulated prices need to incorporate an option to delay, depend on the nature of demand uncertainty.     

A difficulty with the address models of product differentiation

Summary. In models of product differentiation and location models it is implicitly assumed that consumers can afford to buy the differentiated goods in the market. I show that with income heterogeneity there are severe existence problems of a price equilibrium in models of horizontal product differentiation with unit demand because some consumers are income-constrained. The result generalizes to other models of product differentiation, search, and switching costs. I present an alternative specification of variable individual demand in which this kind of existence problem cannot arise. Received: October 17, 1997; revised version: February 20, 1998     

消费者对可追溯食品的态度、购买意愿及影响因素——基于北京市调查的检验与分析

本文在依据消费者对可追溯食品需求函数确定消费者购买决策准则的基础上,运用Logistic二元选择模型实证检验并分析了北京市消费者对可追溯食品的态度、购买意愿及影响因素。主要结论如下:消费者对可追溯食品的认知度较低,对可追溯食品的购买意愿不显著;除了价格是影响消费者购买意愿的主要因素外,消费者对食品安全的信心、是否是家庭主要食品购买者、收入水平、对安全信息的关心、年龄、对可追溯食品的认知、食品安全责任人重视程度等是影响消费者对可追溯食品购买意愿的非常显著性因素。     

通胀预期对未来住房价格的影响——基于消费者信心指数的分析

以消费者信心指数作为通货膨胀预期指标,以中国1999—2010年住房市场月度数据为样本,实证检验通货膨胀预期对未来住房价格的影响。实证检验结果表明,通货膨胀预期会导致住房价格上涨,即生产者和消费者对通货膨胀预期将推动住房价格的不断上涨,因此,稳定通货膨胀预期对于稳定住房价格具有十分重要的作用。     

AN ANALYSIS OF INTERNATIONAL PRICE DIFFERENTIALS ON EBAY

Online auction sites like eBay provide ways to measure what consumers buy and how much they pay. Does this imply that consumers pay similar prices, irrespective of their location? Comparing prices for homogeneous, tradable goods in the euro area and the United Kingdom, we find that prices differ significantly. The differential is not related to countries' having different currencies. However, price dispersion—the variance of prices—does seem to be smaller if two countries share a common currency. Our results confirm the importance of national borders in explaining price differences and their magnitude is related to (not) sharing a common currency. (JEL E30, E31, E50, F40)     

Price search and spatial competition

In this paper we study a model where two spatially scattered sellers face a population of consumers dispersed over a given geographical area; they have to incur a transaction cost to place their purchase order. Moreover these consumers have imperfect knowledge of prices, but obtain full information about prices at the first shop they solicit. We study price competition between these firms. The main outcomes of our analysis are as follows. First we show that whenever a price equilibrium exists for given locations of firms, it will necessarily display price dispersion. Second we study location configurations which ensure the existence of a price equilibrium. Furthermore we show that when it exists, a price equilibrium is unique. Finally we analyze firms revenues when merchants anticipate the consequences of their locational choice on subsequent price competition. Then we find that there is an incentive for a firm to get as close as possible to its competitor.     

Price and quality competition

This study considers an oligopoly model with simultaneous price and quality choice. Ex-ante homogeneous sellers compete by offering products at one of two quality levels. The consumers have heterogeneous tastes for quality: for some consumers it is efficient to buy a high quality product, while for others it is efficient to buy a low quality product. In the symmetric equilibrium firms use mixed strategies that randomize both price and quality, and obtain strictly positive profits. This framework highlights trade-offs which determine the impact of consumer protection policy in the form of quality standards.     

Understanding the Effect of Productivity Changes on International Relative Prices: The Role of News Shocks

The US real exchange rate and terms of trade have been found to appreciate when US labour productivity increases relative to the rest of the world. This finding is at odds with predictions from standard international macroeconomic models. In this paper, we find that incorporating news shocks to total factor productivity (TFP) in an otherwise standard open‐economy sticky‐price dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with variable capital utilization can help the model replicate the above empirical finding. Labour productivity increases in our model after a positive news shock to TFP because of an increase in capital utilization. Under some plausible calibrations, the wealth effect of good news about future productivity can increase domestic demand strongly and induce an increase in home goods prices relative to foreign goods prices.     

Quality uncertainty and time inconsistency in a durable good market

In a durable good monopoly where consumers cannot observe quality prior to purchase and product improvement occurs exogenously over time, I show that uncertainty in quality may resolve the time inconsistency problem (even for low levels of product improvement). Higher dispersion in quality creates greater demand for future product by increasing the incentive of buyers with inferior quality realizations to repeat purchase and this, in turn, reduces the incentive of the seller to cut future price. For various levels of product improvement, I characterize the range of quality uncertainty for which the market equilibrium is identical to one where the monopolist can credibly precommit to future prices. I also show that the presence of quality uncertainty can lead to no trading in the primary good market. Further, in contrast to the literature on the Coase conjecture, inability to precommit to future prices can reduce social welfare as a result of the market closure.     

Asymmetric search and prospect theory: choice experiment on consumer willingness to search in the gasoline retail market

We use an internet survey conducted among a representative random sample of drivers in the State of Ohio consisting of a choice experiment designed to examine the mechanism driving asymmetric search. The internet survey affords us the opportunity to overcome endogeneity difficulties by imposing exogenous price changes on gasoline consumers to examine the decision-making process behind intended search decisions. We randomly assigned participants to one of five price treatments (either 2.5 or 5% above or below their reported expected price, or no change). We provide a simple empirical model to derive testable implications under prospect theory and use the internet survey to test them. Results indicate that among the respondents who faced prices below their expected price, only 12% chose to search, whereas 45% searched when prices were above. Further, we find results consistent with asymmetric search being driven by prospect theory. The change in consumers’ willingness to search is twice as large when prices exceed expectations by 2.5% relative to when prices exceed them by 5% suggesting that consumers derive utility of finding a good deal evaluated relative to a reference price. We show that this result is inconsistent with standard utility theory or consumers using alternative reference prices.