The marketplace, along with its price system, is the single most important institution in a western-style free enterprise economy. The ability of prices to adjust to changes in supply and demand conditions enables the market to function efficiently and lies behind the magical invisible hand...

The price system, the adjustment of prices to changes in market conditions, is the primary mechanism by which markets function and by which the three most basic questions get answered: what to produce, how much to produce and for whom to produce. To the behaviour of price and price system,...

If producers have more information than consumers about goods’ attributes, then they may use non-price (rather than price) adjustment mechanisms and, consequently, the market may reach a new equilibrium even if prices remain sticky. We study a situation where producers adjust the quantity (per...

This is a discussion of "Change at the Checkout: Tracing the Impact of a Process Innovation" by Emek Basker, at the December 24, 2013 Israeli I.O. Day at Tel-Aviv University.

This introductory essay briefly summarizes the eleven empirical studies of price setting and price adjustment that are included in this special issue. The studies, which use data from several European countries, were conducted as part of the European Central Bank’s Inflation Persistence Network.

Analyzing a large weekly retail transaction price dataset, we uncover a surprising regularity—small price increases occur more frequently than small price decreases for price changes of up to about 10 cents, while there is no such asymmetry for larger price changes. The asymmetry holds for the...

Discussion of "The Pricing Behavior of Firms in the Euro Area: New Survey Evidence" by S. Fabiani, M. Druant, I. Hernando, C. Kwapil, B. Landau, C. Loupias, F. Martins, T. Mathä, R. Sabbatini, H. Stahl, and A. Stockman (2004); Presented at the Inflation Persistence Network (IPN) Conference on...