We investigate micro pricing behaviour in groceries (the UK’s most important consumer market) over eight years including the inflationary period of early 2008. We find behaviour sharply distinguished from most previous work, namely that overall basket prices rise but more individual prices fall than rise! This is consistent with retailers obscuring the fact of rising basket prices. We employ a ...

This paper presents a two-country model in which consumers’ utility from tradable goods depends on their consumption of complementary goods and services. The model is consistent with the stylized fact that markups are higher in rich countries: In countries with more complementary goods and services consumer demand is less elastic, enabling monopolistically competitive firms to charge higher pri...

We study a framework where two duopolists compete repeatedly in prices and where chosen prices potentially affect future market shares, but certainly do not affect current sales. This assumption of consumer inertia causes (noncooperative) coordination on high prices only to be possible as an equilibrium for low values of the discount factor. In particular, high discount factors increase opportu...

Inclusion of nontraded goods prices has been shown to be partly responsible for slow convergence in price indices across major cities in the United States (Cecchetti et al 2002). Drawing upon insights provided by well known theories, this paper uses panel econometric methods to seek evidence in U.S. city level Consumer Price Index (CPI) data of a systematic long-run relationship between prices ...

We study a framework where two duopolists compete repeatedly in prices and where chosen prices potentially affect future market shares, but certainly do not affect current sales. This assumption of consumer inertia causes (noncooperative) coordination on high prices only to be possible as an equilibrium for low values of the discount factor. In particular, high discount factors increase opportu...

nterest in commodity prices as indicators of consumer price inflation has ebbed and flowed with the rise and fall in commodity prices themselves. True to form, as commodity prices have surged in the last two years (Chart 1), interest in their predictive power has returned. Inflation hawks point to an outpouring of studies in the late 1980s showing a strong empirical connection between commodity...

Price variation is a fundamental characteristic of many homogenous goods markets and the extent to which it is driven by consumer characteristics and the equilibrium behavior of firms has received considerable attention. Implicit in most empirical marketing studies of consumables is the notion that consumers are largely unconstrained in their response to price variation – that is, consumer resp...

We present a laboratory experiment on the impact of price framing on consumer decision making. Consumer subjects face a search market where two sellers offer a homogeneous good. We examine six different price frames with linear perunit pricing (that is displayed as such) serving as a benchmark. We find that all frames deviating from the benchmark have some negative impact on consumer decision m...