Empirical studies have delivered mixed conclusions on whether the widely acclaimed assertions of lower electronic retail (e-tail) prices are true and to what extent these prices impact conventional retail prices, profits, and consumer welfare. For goods that require little in-person preor postsales support such as CDs, DVDs, and books, we extend Balasubramanian’s e-tailer-in-the-center, spatial...

Analysis of the welfare effect of advertising depends critically upon the effect of advertising on market prices. In many circumstances, advertising that leads to higher (lower) market prices is overproduced (underproduced) from society s perspective. This paper demonstrates that these predictions may not hold when consumer search costs are important. A model is developed to show how advertisin...

this study uses vector error correction model to examine the effects of oilseeds, crude oil and vegetable oil tariffs on vegetable oil consumer price. monthly data sets for the years 2004-2013 and var and vecm models were applied for this study. research findings indicates only a long term equilibrium relation between the study variables .the effect of vegetable oil tariffs on consumer and prod...

The link (or lack of link) between food commodity prices and consumer prices is an important issue not only for academics but also for policymakers. This paper asks how and to what extent changes in food commodity prices spill over to consumer prices, using a new data set for the euro area as well as a new empirical approach. The authors find that there is a statistically significant link betwe...

W examine the impact of reduced search costs on prices of commodity products in electronic marketplaces. Conventionally, reduced consumer search costs may be expected to engender stronger price competition between firms, resulting in lower prices and improved consumer welfare. This notion was formalized in Stahl (1989, “Oligopolistic pricing with sequential consumer search,” American Economic R...

Pareto improvements that require no information about individual characteristics are analyzed. Initially, equilibrium must be production inefficient. After the policy change, consumer prices differ from producer prices, but allocations, although second-best, are Pareto superior and production efficient. Policy implementation is modeled as a dynamical system that governs aggregate consumer wealt...

We review the effects of a dollar appreciation on U.S. inflation, and on U.S. import and export prices. We calibrate the effects to match the 15 percent dollar appreciation that has occurred since June 2014. Pass-through into import prices and consumer prices is modest. Specifically, a 15 percent dollar appreciation should reduce consumer prices by a quarter of a percentage point in the short r...