We study the price adjustment practices and provide quantitative measurement of the managerial and customer costs of price adjustment using data from a large U.S. industrial manufacturer and its customers. We find that price adjustment costs are a much more complex construct than the existing...

Using unique retail and wholesale price data for 4,532 products carried by a major Midwestern grocery retailer, we find evidence of significant retail price rigidity during the Thanksgiving through Christmas holiday period relative to the rest of the year. We suggest that this pattern of holiday...

Using weekly retail transaction scanner price data from a large U.S supermarket chain, we find significantly higher retail price rigidity for private label products than for nationally branded products during the Christmas and Thanksgiving holiday periods relative to the rest of the year. The...

We use a unique store-level data set to directly measure menu costs and to study the price change process at a large U.S. drugstore chain. We compare and contrast the magnitude of these measures with similar measures from 4 large U.S. supermarket chains. We find that (1) the actual magnitude of...

We use store-level data to document the exact process of changing prices and to directly measure menu costs at five multi-store supermarket chains. We show that changing prices in these establishments is a complex process, requiring dozens of steps and a nontrivial amount of resources. The menu...

We offer the first direct evidence of an implicit contract in a goods market. The evidence we offer comes from the market for Coca-Cola. We demonstrate that the Coca-Cola Company left a substantial amount of written evidence of its implicit contract with its consumers—a very explicit form of...

The literature on costs of price adjustment has long argued that changing prices is a complex and costly process. In fact, some authors have suggested that we should think of firms’ price-setting activities as “producing” prices, similar to the way firms use production processes to produce...

In this study, we empirically examine the extent of price rigidity using a unique store-level time series data set - consisting of (i) actual retail transaction prices, (ii) actual wholesale transaction prices which represent both the retailers' costs and the prices received by manufacturers,...

Analyzing scanner price data that cover 27 product categories over an eight-year period from a large Mid-western supermarket chain, we uncover a surprising regularity in the data—small price increases occur more frequently than small price decreases. We find that this asymmetry holds for price...