We empirically study the price adjustment process at multiproduct retail stores. We use a unique store level data set for five large supermarket and one drugstore chains in the USA, to document the exact process required to change prices. Our data set allows us to study this process in great detail, describing the exact procedure, stages, and steps undertaken during the price change process. We...

This paper proposes an economic dispatch strategy for the electricity system with one generation company, multiple utility companies and multiple consumers, which participate in demand response to keep the electricity real-time balance. In the wholesale markets, multiple utility companies will commonly select a reliable agent to negotiate with the generation company on the wholesale price. It i...

Milk pricing in California is often controversial. Consumer advocates and their organizations periodically charge that retail milk prices are “unfair” or “too high” and call for public intervention in the fluid-milk market. The consumer view is expressed by Consumers Union, which after conducting surveys of retail milk prices in Los Angeles and San Francisco area food stores, charged that large...

Retail gasoline prices are known to respond fairly slowly to wholesale price changes. This does not appear to be true for markets with Edgeworth price cycles. Recently, many retail gasoline markets in the midwestern U.S. and other countries have been shown to exhibit price cycles, in which competition generates rapid cyclical retail price movements. We show that cost changes in cycling markets ...

In this paper we investigate price decreases made by sellers of multi-component systems. Price reductions are perhaps the most widely used retail tactic to boost sales, and the desired magnitude of price reductions is of great interest to marketers. On the one hand, small price reductions when large reductions are warranted may only deplete retail margins without any impact on sales volume. On ...

We investigate the operational decisions and resulting profits for a supply chain facing price-dependent demand under a policy where there is an ex-ante commitment made on the retail price markup. We obtain closed-form solutions for this policy under the assumption of a multiplicative demand function and we analytically compare its performance with that of a traditional price-only policy. We co...

The paper revisits the conventional wisdom according to which vertical restrictions on retail prices help upstream firms to collude. We analyze the scope for collusion with and without resale price maintenance (RPM) when retailers observe local shocks on demand or retail costs. In the absence of RPM, retail prices react to retailers’ information and deviations from collusive behavior are thus d...

We develop a reduced-form model of price transmission in a vertical sector, allowing for refined asymmetric, contemporaneous and lagged, own and cross price effects. The model is used to analyze wholesale-retail price dynamics in the US butter market. The analysis provides strong evidence of asymmetric price transmissions. It documents the complex nature of nonlinear price dynamics in a vertica...

The retail price a household pays for the last unit of grid-supplied electricity consumed is an important driver of the decision to install a rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) system. This price is the cost a household avoids by consuming a kilowatt-hour (KWh) from their rooftop solar system. Consequently, if the levelized cost of a KWh from a rooftop solar system is less than this retail price, ...

a r t i c l e i n f o JEL classification: D82 D83 Q49 L11 L12 L94 Keywords: Price pass-through Norwegian electricity market Price asymmetry Market power Transmission lag In this paper we estimate the pass-through of wholesale electricity price to the end consumer price with variable price contracts in the Norwegian electricity market using weekly data. We find substantial asymmetry when retaile...