Barcodes and barcode scanners transformed the grocery industry in the 1970s. I use store-level data from the 1972, 1977, and 1982 Census of Retail Trade, matched to data on store scanner installations, to estimate scanners' effect on labor productivity. I find that early scanners increased a...

This volume collects a series of essays that I have written over the last decade on multi-sided platform businesses that create value by providing products that enable two or more different types of customers to get together, find each other, and exchange value. Part I presents background pieces...

This paper examines dynamic pricing behavior in retail gasoline markets for 19 Canadian cities over 574 weeks. I find three distinct retail pricing patterns: 1. standard cost-based pricing, 2. sticky pricing, and 3. steep, asymmetric retail price cycles that, while seldom documented empirically,...

The Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice have traditionally used market shares as an early preliminary screen in evaluating the potential for anticompetitive effects of a proposed merger. Recently, Farrell and Shapiro proposed a new merger screen known...

In a retail gasoline market exhibiting Edgeworth Price Cycles, prices change asymmetrically with many small decreases interrupted by occasional large increases. The result is a de facto menu of prices from which consumers can choose based on exactly when they buy. This article introduces four...

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...