Data on sales of memory modules are used to explore several aspects of e-retail demand. There is a strong relationship between e-retail sales to a given state and sales tax rates that apply to purchases from online retailers. This suggests that there is substantial substitution between online...

Most items are sold to consumers by retail stores. Stores have two features that distinguish them from auctions. First, the price is posted and a consumer who values the good at more than the posted price is sold the good. Second, the sale takes place as soon as the consumer decides to buy. In...

Cigarettes are experience goods - most of their utility value only gets revealed when one consumes them. We hypothesize a three phase consumer life cycle for experience goods. Consumers initially do not know their utility from the good or their preferences for particular characteristics, and may...

We show that most US food, drugstore, and mass merchandise chains charge nearly-uniform prices across stores, despite wide variation in consumer demographics and competition. Demand estimates reveal substantial within-chain variation in price elasticities and suggest that the median chain...

Sellers of new products are faced with having to guess demand conditions to set price appropriately. But sellers are able to adjust price over time and to learn from past mistakes. Additionally, it is not necessary that all goods be sold with certainty. It is sometimes better to set a high price...

We analyze a number of unstudied aspects of retail electricity competition. We first explore the implications of load profiling of consumers whose traditional meters do not allow for measurement of their real time consumption, when consumers are homogeneous up to a scaling factor. In general,...

The standard economic model of efficient competitive markets relies on the ability of sellers to charge prices that vary as their costs change. Yet, there is no restructured electricity market in which most retail customers can be charged realtime prices (RTP), prices that can change as...

This paper studies commodity taxation in a model featuring heterogeneous consumers, imperfect competition, and tax salience. We derive new formulas for the incidence and marginal excess burden of commodity taxation, and we find that tax salience and market structure interact when considering tax...

After outlining characteristics of Japan's distribution sector, a comprehensive international comparison of it to those of other nations is presented and analyzed for underlying differences. This leads to an explanation of Japan's retail store density, which is then related to the structure of...