Download or read book Essays on Price Rigidity on the Internet written by Dongwon Lee and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Price Rigidity on the Internet to 25 Pages 26 to 50 Pages 51 to 75 Pages 76 to 100 Pages 101 to 125 Pages 126 to 150 Pages 151 to 175 Pages 176 to 200 Pages 201 to 205 written by Dongwon Lee and published by ProQuest. This book was released on 2000 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Price Rigidity in the UK written by Kun Tian and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study consists of three individual essays which all shed light on assessing the price rigidity by using price micro data in the UK. The relevant implications for macro models are also discussed in each essay respectively. The first essay gives a unified framework a la Dixon (2012) to gauge the price rigidity from three perspectives: frequency, hazard function and distribution across firms. On average, the monthly frequency of consumer price change is 19% between 1996 and 2007. Sales and substitutions will significantly affect the frequency of consumer price change. The frequency of consumer price change varies considerable across sectors. The fraction of price changes which are decreasing is about 40%. The hazard function is downward sloping with 12-month spike. The censoring and sampling issues in the estimation of hazard function are discussed thoroughly. The distribution across firms is derived from estimated hazard function, which is consistent with the frequency of price changes. Two benchmark sticky price models are calibrated and simulated. Furthermore, a multiple Calvo and multiple menu costs model are also simulated, based on the empirical finding in micro data. The simulation results suggest that introducing heterogeneity into sticky price models can improve models' fitness in respect to matching micro evidence. The second essay mainly focus on "the monthly frequency of price changes", which is a prominent feature of many studies of the CPI micro-data. In this essay, we see how much the frequency ties down the behavior of price-setters ("firms") in steady-state in terms of the average length of price-spells across firms. We are able to divide an upper and lower bound for the mean duration of price-spells averaged across firms. We use the UK CPI data at the aggregate and sectoral level and find that the actual mean is about twice the theoretical minimum consistent with the observed frequency. We estimate the distribution using the hazard function and find that although the estimated hazard differs significantly from the Calvo distribution, the means and medians are similar. However, despite the micro differences, we find that the artificial Calvo distributions generated using the sectoral frequencies result in very similar impulse responses to the estimated hazards when used in the Smets-Wouters (2003) model. The third essay examines the behavior of individual producer prices in the UK. A number of stylized facts about price setting behavior are uncovered. A time-varying Ss model is set up in a way that is consistent with the stylized facts obtained from the UK PPI data. A duration model (semiparametric survival analysis model) is built in line with the time-varying Ss model. This duration model is estimated by controlling for observed and unobserved heterogeneity across firms. The estimation results suggest that the increase in the inflation rate will significantly increase the hazard rate of price change. The other factors considered in the model will also affect the hazard rate of price change, while in different magnitude.

Download or read book Price Rigidity in Internet Retailing written by Robert J. Kauffman and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Price rigidity involves prices that do not change with the regularity predicted by standard economic theory, and is of long-standing interest to firms and industries, and relates to the economy as a whole. As information technology (IT) changes the processes by which strategic pricing decisions are implemented in business operations, there is a need to develop a more substantial managerial understanding of firm pricing in production process terms. In the 1990s, technology-driven pricing was largely in the domain of the airlines, hotels and rental car companies in the practice of revenue yield management. Now it is possible for bricks-and-clicks firms, and even traditional retailers, to implement systems that permit significant adjustments to be made to prices in situations where menu costs previously made rapid price changes difficult to achieve in an economical way. As a result, we believe that the issue of price rigidity on the Internet should be considered with broader and more deeply insightful inquiry. We draw upon theoretical perspectives that are largely new to the field of Information Systems (IS), but that offer rich opportunities for theory building and empirical research in settings of high interdisciplinary interest. Such studies will provide a distinctive foundation for IS research and serve as a guide to research for a variety of new economic phenomena in economies that are influenced by firm investments in Internet technology. In our analysis of the relevant theories, we identified those that are most likely to enhance our understanding of pricing on the Internet, and we have discussed a series of logical contradictions among competing and complementary theories that must be reconciled to identify the most relevant ways to understand the Internet retailing context.

Download or read book Essays on Price Dispersion and Policy Analysis written by Viacheslav Sheremirov and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pivotal question in macroeconomics is how output, employment, and price level react to monetary, fiscal, and productivity shocks, both in business-cycle models and in the data. Sticky prices are often considered as one of the key amplification and propagation mechanisms for such shocks. However, there is still a widespread debate how sticky prices are and why they are sticky. This dissertation sheds a new light on this question. Chapter 1 relies on a relatively understudied measure of price stickiness--cross-sectional dispersion of prices--to distinguish between different models of price rigidity, while Chapter 2 measures price stickiness in online markets. With e-commerce becoming a significantly larger sector of the economy, this is one of the first attempts to understand pricing in online markets from data comparable to those used for brick-and-mortar stores. Since different business-cycle models make conflicting predictions about effects of demand shocks, in Chapter 3 I approach this question empirically by estimating the size of fiscal multipliers from military spending data. Such empirical estimates may help researchers and policymakers to distinguish between various models. In macroeconomic models, the level of price dispersion, which is typically approximated using its relationship with inflation, is a central determinant of welfare, the cost of business cycles, the optimal rate of inflation, and the trade-off between inflation and output stability. While the comovement of price dispersion and inflation implied by standard models is positive, in this dissertation I show that it is actually negative in the data. Chapter 1 shows that sales play a pivotal role: i) if sales are removed from the data, the comovement of price dispersion and inflation turns positive; ii) models in which price dispersion is due to price rigidity cannot quantitatively match the comovement even for regular prices; iii) the Calvo model with sales can quantitatively match both the negative comovement found in the data and the positive comovement for regular prices. Finally, I show that models that fail to match the degree of comovement in the data can significantly mismeasure welfare and its determinants. Chapter 2 focuses on price-setting practices in online markets examined through the lens of a novel dataset on price listings and the number of clicks from the Google Shopping Platform. This unique dataset contains information on price quotes and the number of clicks at the daily frequency for a broad variety of consumer goods and sellers in the US and UK over the period of nearly two years. This chapter provides estimates of the frequency of price adjustment, price synchronization across sellers and goods, as well as the distribution of the sizes of price changes. It compares the estimates for the case when information on quantity margin is observed--as in the scanner data from brick-and-mortar stores--with the case when it is not, which is typical in the literature on online prices. It concludes that many internet prices that do not change often obtain very few clicks. The key findings are the following: First, despite the cost of price change being negligible, prices appear relatively sticky. Second, if the quantity margin is accounted for, prices are much more flexible. It remains a question why low-demand sellers do not adjust their prices often, yet maintain costly price listings on the platform. Third, in spite of low costs of monitoring competitors' prices and high benefits from doing so--since search costs for consumers are low too--there is little price synchronization across sellers. Fourth, the distribution of the sizes of price changes is characterized by a non-trivial mass around zero, which is inconsistent with the state-dependent models with fixed menu costs, but favors time-dependent models of price adjustment. Hence, online prices change infrequently, by a large amount, and are not synchronized across sellers. In Chapter 3, I use a multi-country dataset on disaggregated military spending to document the effect of government expenditure by sector on aggregate output. The data obtained from multiple sources including UN, NATO, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) allow to systematically break down total military expenditure into that on durables versus nondurables and services for 69 countries within 1950-1997 period. I show that the spending multiplier is larger when government spends on durables rather than on nondurables or services, which could be due to differences in price flexibility, intertemporal elasticity of substitution, or some other sectoral factors. Although the estimates suffer from the lack of precision, the finding is robust across data sources and groups of countries. Quantitatively, the durables multiplier could be up to four times as high as that for nondurables and services. I use the dataset to estimate the standard spending multiplier as a litmus test, which results in a conventional fiscal multiplier of the size of about 1 ranging from 0.6 to 1.3 in different samples of countries.

Download or read book Essays on Price Dynamics written by Gee Hee Hong and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Standard macro models typically assume that producers sell goods directly to final consumers, while, in reality, the distribution network or vertical structure from a manufacturer to a consumer takes various forms. The boundary of firms, or to what extent a firm wishes to extend its distribution or manufacturing process is not a trivial issue when firms develop sourcing strategies. A substantial number of recent studies in international trade have demonstrated systematic patterns in intra-firm trade patterns and price patterns. Inclusion of vertical chains possibly generates frictions by means of double-marginalization problem, asymmetric information and coordination issues, while the choice of vertical structure is an endogenous choice of transaction cost minimization and contractibility. The first part of work discusses the price patterns by documenting several facts about price rigidity using a large grocery retail data set. The role of retailers has been completely neglected in standard macro pricing models. However, consumers seldom interact with manufacturers directly, especially for grocery items. The assumption that retail level is negligible would be innocuous only if the wholesale price dynamics is similar to retail price dynamics. That is, only when retailers fully pass through the wholesale price to consumers and do not influence the prices that have been set by manufacturers would this assumption make sense. Using detailed information of weekly price and cost from a major retailer store that operates across the United States, we find strong evidence that retail price dynamics are completely different from manufacturer price dynamics. We find two main reasons for why retail prices cannot fully reflect wholesale prices. First, retailers cannot do so because retailers face costs of their own aside from wholesale price. Second, retailers react to variations in demand more directly than wholesalers. Pass-through rate of retailer cost (including wholesale price and extra costs to retailers) to retail price is incomplete. We also find that (1) retail pass-through rate is incomplete, (2) retail pass-through rate and retail price rigidity is negatively correlated, (3) categories with higher retail mark-up show lower pass-through rate, (4) price rigidity is heterogeneous across categories, (5) competition within a category shows positive correlation with pass-through rate, but the correlation is less obvious in the scatter plots and (6) retail price duration is shorter than wholesale price duration, while retail price duration is longer than retail cost duration. In a simple model where retailers play non-neutral role, we can successfully explain the empirical findings, while models with neutral retailers or no retailers fail to explain the findings. The second part of work discusses the relationship between the vertical structure and the price rigidity. In the job market paper, "Vertical Integration and Retail Pricing Facts for Macroeconomists: Private Label vs. National Brand" (co-authored with Nicholas Li), we propose to extend this analysis to retail behavior and also into closed economy using a data set that contains prices and wholesale costs for a retail chain that operates in the United States. The retailer owns numerous brands that are sold in its stores - ownership in this case implies control over branding, marketing and packaging in all cases and in many cases control over manufacturing as well. We call these private labels and consider equivalent to intra-firm in open macro literature. Beyond generalizing the findings of previous studies to the retail sector and a different data set, the significant growth of store-brands makes the impact of vertical integration in retail on intra and inter-national pricing behavior of independent interest. By analyzing the main dimensions of pricing (duration, cost pass-through and synchronization), we find that the private label goods show shorter price duration, greater cost shock pass-through and greater synchronization of price changes than national brands counterpart. These findings are consistent with previous literature using trade dataset. We compare two existing models that can potentially explain these facts -one featuring symmetric retail demand but different vertical structures/double-marginalization, and the other featuring demand asymmetry and price discrimination as a motive for sales to find evidence that two models are complementary. If vertical structure is endogenous, with vertically integrated lower-priced products gaining market share for product categories, we argue that it can serve as a potential multiplier for demand-based induced changes in retail pricing behavior. One example that shows retailers' non-neutral role in price-setting mechanism is the existence of sales at retail level. With a recent surge of micro-level data sets from various sources, researchers have been able to examine price dynamics at a disaggregate level and to test previously established macro-pricing models. A notable feature of price dynamics across all of these data sets is significant heterogeneity across products and sectors in measured pass-through and frequency due to temporary discounts, or sales. Previous studies have demonstrated that the retailer is largely responsible for the timing and size of temporary discounts. Sales prices behave qualitative and quantitatively different from regular prices. Yet, researchers have not reached a conclusion whether or not and how to incorporate intermittent price into crucial issues, such as, macro price-setting models and price index constructions. The core of the question is whether sales have any implications for business cycle and monetary neutrality. The question is also intimately related to how economic agents respond to shocks - how retailers adjust their profit-maximizing strategies, how consumers adjust their consumption patterns in response to cost shocks. The third chapter of work, "On the Cyclicality of Effective Prices" with Professors Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Olivier Coibin directly tackles this issue. We study the cyclical properties of sales, regular price changes and average prices paid by consumers in a dataset containing prices and quantities sold for numerous retailers across a variety of U.S. metropolitan areas. Both the frequency and size of sales fall when unemployment rates rise and yet the inflation rate of average prices paid by consumers declines with higher unemployment. This discrepancy can be reconciled by consumers reallocating their expenditures across retailers, a feature of the data which we document and quantify. The results point toward a cyclical mis-measurement of inflation which can account for part of the "missing disinflation" during the Great Recession.

Download or read book Essays on Price Stickiness written by Kevin Daniel Sheedy and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Nominal Rigidities Bounded Rationality and Macroeconomic Policy written by Mikel Petri Castro and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters about macroeconomic policy. In the first chapter, I study the empirical relationship between nominal rigidities and the real effects of monetary policy. Nominal rigidities lie at the core of macroeconomics. The empirical evidence suggests that prices and wages adjust sluggishly to aggregate shocks, while theoretical models justify why and to what extent these rigidities imply monetary non-neutrality. However, direct evidence on nominal rigidities being the actual channel for the transmission of these shocks is relatively scarce. I construct a highly disaggregated measure of regional price stickiness for the U.S. and use it to provide evidence of this channel. My results are in line with sticky price models, indicating that employment in more rigid industries and commuting zones tend to have stronger reactions to monetary policy shocks. In the second chapter, joint with Emmanuel Farhi and Iván Werning, we document the extreme sensitivity of New Keynesian models to fiscal policy announcements during a liquidity trap--a phenomenon we call the “fiscal multiplier puzzle”. The response of current output to government spending grows exponentially in the horizon of the stimulus. Surprisingly, the introduction of rule-of-thumb hand-to-mouth agents, combined with deficit-financed stimulus, can easily generate negative multipliers that are equally explosive. This intuition translates to incomplete markets heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian models, leading to large negative multipliers when taxes are backloaded. We construct a belief-augmented New Keynesian framework to understand the role played by expectations in shaping the fiscal multiplier puzzle. The key element behind this result is the extreme coordination of the demand and supply blocks under rational expectations. Common knowledge between these two blocks induces an inflation-spending feedback loop. Government spending boosts aggregate demand and drives up inflation, which in turn leads to lower real rates and higher spending by households, increasing aggregate demand again. We break this strategic complementarity by introducing bounded rationality in the form of level-k thinking. In contrast to rational expectations, level-k multipliers are bounded and tend to zero over infinite horizons for all finite k. Moreover, level-k interacts strongly with incomplete markets in two different ways. First, the attenuation of the multipliers increases for any level of k on the degree of market incompleteness, especially in the future. Second, in contrast to complete markets, incomplete markets increase the magnitude of the multipliers for low levels of k when taxes are backloaded, making deficits more effective at stimulating the economy. In the third chapter, I explore the implications of downward nominal wage rigidities for fiscal policy and inflation in a liquidity trap. The standard Phillips Curve predicts big declines in economic activity should be accompanied by big deflation episodes. I study whether downward nominal wage rigidity can explain the missing deflation during the Great Recession. To do so, I introduce wage rigidity in a standard cash-in-advance liquidity trap model. My results show that nominal wage rigidities are consistent with mild deflationary episodes only when the trap is expected to be very short-lived. Away from this case, the model predicts large deflations and drops in output as in standard New Keynesian models. I also study the impact of fiscal policy in my setup, finding large multipliers that increase with the degree of wage rigidity. The main reason behind the effectiveness of government spending is its persistent effects on economic activity. Wage rigidity generates unemployment persistence due to pent-up wage deflation. Fiscal spending boosts aggregate demand and decreases deflationary pressures today. This increases output today and in the future by relaxing the downward wage rigidity constraint in all subsequent periods. Keywords: nominal rigidities, price stickiness, monetary policy, regional, bounded rationality, incomplete markets, level-k, fiscal policy, downward nominal wage rigidity. JEL Classification: E52, E62, E7.

Download or read book Beyond the Hype of Frictionless Markets written by Mark E. Bergen and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We explore daily patterns of Internet pricing for the two major retailers, Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com (BN), using data on 377 books collected over a 449-day period in 2003-2004. We frame this investigation in terms of a key question: How rigid are prices on the Internet? Are there reasons to suggest that prior predictions of more flexible prices on the Internet may not have been founded on the appropriate theoretical knowledge? We find that Internet retailers, in contrast with traditional firms, adjust prices any day of the week throughout the year. Yet, firms' price adjustments for books occur much less frequently than daily-every 90 days on average. For most observers of Internet-based selling, this is surprising, since most expect more frequent price adjustments-based on the quality of technological environment that supports price-setting. In fact, our results show that price change activity appears to vary by book category, from a high of one change on average every 61 days for bestsellers to a low of one change every 184 days on average for steadysellers. In addition, we learned that individual firms exhibited different patterns for their price changes: Amazon changed book prices every 222 days, while BN changed its book prices more frequently, every 56 days on average.

Download or read book The Next Digital Decade written by Berin Szoka and published by TechFreedom. This book was released on 2011-06-10 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Economics Information Systems and Electronic Commerce written by Robert J. Kauffman and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 2008 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking volume introduces new methodological approaches to data analysis as well as new techniques for collecting and cataloging transactional data to assist IS researchers in dealing with new and radical forms of IT innovation that continue to energize electronic commerce.

Download or read book Economics Information Systems and Electronic Commerce Empirical Research written by Robert J. Kauffman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The methods and thinking of economics permeate a large part of the IS discipline. Reciprocally, newly emerging research methods relying on the IT-enabled treatment of massive data aggregates feed economic research. As new and radical forms of IT innovation continue to energize electronic commerce, IS researchers face a daunting task in using existing empirical methods and tools to understand the threats, opportunities, risks, and rewards of these new techniques. This groundbreaking volume leads the way. It introduces new methodological approaches to data analysis as well as new techniques for collecting and cataloging transactional data. The ideas it presents have broad appeal and demonstrate what is possible when new techniques and new ways of thinking are brought to bear on complex research problems.

Download or read book The Antitrust Paradox written by Robert Bork and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-22 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important book on antitrust ever written. It shows how antitrust suits adversely affect the consumer by encouraging a costly form of protection for inefficient and uncompetitive small businesses.

Download or read book Three Essays in Empirical Industrial Organization written by Maria Andrea Martens Olivares and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Interrelated Media Markets written by Ralf Dewenter and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Economic Freedom and Interventionism written by Ludwig Von Mises and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic Freedom and Interventionism is both a primer of the fundamental thought of Ludwig von Mises and an anthology of the writings of perhaps the best-known exponent of what is now known as the Austrian School of economics. This volume contains forty-seven articles edited by Mises scholar Bettina Bien Greaves. Among them are Mises's expositions of the role of government, his discussion of inequality of wealth, inflation, socialism, welfare, and economic education, as well as his exploration of the "deeper" significance of economics as it affects seemingly noneconomic relations between human beings. These papers are valuable reading for students of economic freedom and the science of human action. Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century. Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.