We study experimentally the effect of bargaining power in two sequential mechanisms that offer the possibility to trade at a fixed price before an auction. In the "Buy-It-Now" format, the seller has the bargaining power and offers a price prior to the auction; whereas in the "Sell-It-Now"...

This paper takes advantage of a natural experiment to examine the relationship between the price and saliency of health services. A large employer e-mailed individually-targeted health education encouraging high-value care to high-risk employees. Weeks before the program launched, a company...

We analyze Engel curves for nuclear households in rural China. The sample includes more than 5000 nuclear families covering nineteen out of thirty Chinese provinces. We consider expenditures on food, also subdivided into several food subcategories such as cereals, or meat and fish, and other...

Medical providers often have a significant influence on treatment decisions which they can use in their own financial interest. Classical models of supplier-induced demand predict that medical providers will supply fewer services if they face increasing prices. We test this prediction based on a...

In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the...

We present a new partial equilibrium theory of price adjustment, based on consumer loss aversion. In line with prospect theory, the consumers' perceived utility losses from price increases are weighted more heavily than the perceived utility gains from price decreases of equal magnitude. Price...

Previous research shows that firms shroud high add-on prices in competitive markets with naive consumers leading to inefficiency. We analyze the effects of regulatory intervention via educating naive consumers on equilibrium prices and welfare. Our model allows firms to shroud, unshroud, or...

This paper investigates price-setting for truly homogenous products sold in markets without any formal trade barriers. We use data from IKEA, a furniture company selling identical products in an identical shopping environment in different EU countries. We get four remarkable outcomes: 1) The law...

This paper extends Hall's (1988) methodology to analyse imperfections in both the product and the labour market for firms in the Belgian manufacturing industry over the period 1988-1995. We investigate the heterogeneity in price-cost mark-up and workers' bargaining power parameters among 18...

Evidence on behavior of experts in credence goods markets raises an important causality issue: Do "fair prices" induce "good behavior", or do "good experts" post "fair prices"? To answer this question we propose and test a model with three seller types: "the good" choose fair prices and behave...