The illicit dealing in gemstones (including diamonds) is a fast growing activity in African countries which produce these minerals. Zaire and Angola are two extreme examples, but by no means exceptions. The preferred policy efforts to controlling the flow of illicit trade in gems have been...

What are the prospects of B2B electronic commerce when production is carried out by a number of small firms specialized in single production phases? Prato, Italy, is home to thousands of textile firms as well as the locus of an early and innovative experience of a local Internet in the...

The paper analyses the forces that shape demand and supply processes in the market for cocoa powder. A brief statistical summary is given of the main trends in international demand and production, and the spatial shifts in cocoa processing. Ample attention is given to the role of technology...

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...

The goal of our empirical analysis is to assess whether the changes in cigarette excise taxes and cigarette prices can be attributed to litigation brought by the states and the resulting settlements, holding other factors constant. Using pre-post as well as state excise taxes on beer as...

In Europe the demand of functional foods varies remarkably from country to country, on the basis of the alimentary traditions, the enforced legislation and the different cultural heritage that people have acquired. The opportunities of expansion on the market seem to be quite favorable and the...

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...

We combine two data sets to study price rigidity. The first consists of weekly time series of retail, wholesale, and spot prices for twelve products. These time series contain two exogenous cost shocks. We find that prices exhibit more rigidity in response to the second shock than the first. The...

Vector autoregressions are used to model price transmission through the coffee processing chain, from producers to the world market and from the world market to consumers. A comparison is made of price dynamics against a backdrop of two very different market structures: pre-1989, producers...

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,...