This paper examines the behaviour of individual consumer prices in the United Kingdom, and uncovers a number of stylised facts about pricing behaviour. First, on average 19% of prices change each month, although this falls to 15% if sales are excluded. Second, the probability of price changes is not constant over time. Third, goods prices change more frequently than services prices. Fourth, the...

This paper analyzes how customers’ heterogeneous search and switching habits affect the prices paid for telecommunication services in a context which operators use price discrimination strategies to retain their customers attract those of rivals. Drawing on representative sample Spanish households (N=3,113), we show that engaged consumers pay 9.4% less than completely unengaged services, after ...

This article reviews the empirical evidence on exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices in Australia over the inflation-targeting period. It finds that pass-through is relatively low at the aggregate level but is faster and larger for the prices of manufactured goods, which are often imported. There is some evidence that over the past decade exchange rate movements have been flowing throug...

The issue of pricing contraceptives in family planning programs is becoming more and more important. What is the relationship between consumer prices and demand, and how can we strike the correct balance between the two? This report examines the correlation between consumer prices for condoms, expressed as a percentage of per-capita gross national product, and per-capita sales of condoms in 24 ...

We consider a model of dynamic price competition to analyze the impact of consumer inertia on the ability of firms to sustain high prices. Three main consequences are identified: (i) maintaining high prices does not require punishment strategies when firms are sufficiently myopic, (ii) if buyers are sufficiently inert, then high prices can be sustained for all discount factors, and (iii) the ab...

We establish five facts about prices in the U.S. economy: 1) The median implied duration of consumer prices when sales are excluded at the product level is between 8 and 11 months. The median implied duration of finished goods producer prices is 8.7 months. 2) One-third of regular price changes are price decreases. 3) The frequency of price increases responds strongly to inflation while the fre...

Firms in durable good product markets face incentives to intertemporally price discriminate, by setting high initial prices to sell to consumers with the highest willingness to pay, and cutting prices thereafter to appeal to those with lower willingness to pay. A critical determinant of the profitability of such pricing policies is the extent to which consumers anticipate future price declines,...

Empirical studies to date have delivered mixed conclusions on the question of whether the widely acclaimed assertions of lower electronic retail (e-tail) prices are indeed true, and to what extent these benefits are able to transcend the virtual world by impacting retail prices. One explanation for the mixed conclusions is that they provide only a discrete snapshot of a limited segment of the m...

In recent years, the issue of energy consumption modeling techniques in the building sector has been widely considered by researchers and managers. Researches indicate that energy consumption in residential sector is one of the main parts of the total consumption. Moreover, the urban residence is supposed as a significant consumer of energy in every country and therefore a focus for energy cons...

Consumer reservation price is a key concept in marketing and economics. Theoretically, this concept has been instrumental in studying consumer purchase decisions, competitive pricing strategies, and welfare economics. Managerially, knowledge of consumer reservation prices is critical for implementing many pricing tactics such as bundling, target promotions, nonlinear pricing, and one-to-one pri...