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...

In this paper we argue that pricing is all about price changes, and that the costs of price changes are often simultaneously subtle and substantial. We discuss a framework to deal with the dynamics of changing prices. This framework incorporates customer interpretations of price changes, an...

The Thanksgiving-Christmas holiday period is a major sales period for U.S. retailers. Due to higher store traffic, tasks such as restocking shelves, handling customers' questions and inquiries, running cash registers, cleaning, and bagging, become more urgent during holidays. As a result, the...

There has been increasing interest in understanding how firms undertake nonprice adjustment activities, especially in situations where prices may be rigid despite changes in market conditions. Using scanner price data for over 4,500 different food products from a large U.S. supermarket chain, we...

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...

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...

We study the link between price points and price rigidity, using two datasets - weekly scanner data and Internet data. We find that (i) 9 is the most frequently used price-ending for the penny, dime, dollar, and ten-dollar digits, (ii) the most common price changes are those that keep the price...

We study item-pricing laws (which require that each item in a store be individually marked with a price sticker) and examine and quantify their costs and benefits. On the cost side, we argue that item-pricing laws increase the retailers' costs, forcing them to raise prices. We test this...

The fact that organizations find it hard to change in response to shocks in the environment is a crucial feature of the economy. Yet we know little about why it is so difficult for organizations to adjust, and where these limitations come from. In an effort to discover some of these reasons we...

Asymmetric pricing is the phenomenon where prices rise more readily than they fall. We articulate, and provide empirical support for, a theory of asymmetric pricing in wholesale prices. In particular, we show how wholesale prices may be asymmetric in the small but symmetric in the large, when...