A set of randomized experiments shed light on how markets and information influence household decisions to adopt nutritional innovations. Of 400 Indian villages, we randomly assigned half to an intervention where all shopkeepers were offered the option to sell a new salt, fortified with both...

Reaching-for-yield--investors' propensity to buy riskier assets in order to achieve higher yields--is believed to be an important factor contributing to the credit cycle. This paper presents a detailed study of this phenomenon in the corporate bond market. We show that insurance companies, the...

We present a continuous time series on first cabin passenger fares for ocean travel from New York to the British Isles covering nearly a century of time. We discuss the conceptual and empirical difficulties of constructing such a time series, and examine the reasons for differences between the...

We use a unique dataset that combines information on advertising by subprime lenders and mortgages originated by them from 2002 to 2007 to study the relationship between advertising and the nature of mortgages obtained by consumers. We exploit the richness of our data and measure the relative...

The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of varying prices, displays and information provided to consumers, facilitating both active and passive experimentation. We document the prevalence of targeted pricing and auction design variation on eBay, and identify hundreds of thousands of...

The 2010 Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission Horizontal Merger Guidelines lay out a new standard for assessing proposed mergers in markets with differentiated products. This new standard is based on a measure of ``upward pricing pressure,'' (UPP) and the calculation of a ``gross...

A model is considered where firms internalize the regret costs that consumers experience when they see an unexpected price change. Regret costs are assumed to be increasing in the size of price changes and this can explain why the size of price increases is less sensitive to inflation than in...

This paper starts by discussing consumers' cognitive and emotional reaction to posted prices. Cognitively, some consumers do not appear to make effective use of price information to maximize their consumption-based utility. Emotionally, prices can induce regret and anger among consumers. The...

We propose a method for aggregating prices when retailers use periodic sales to price-discriminate amongst heterogeneous customers. To do so, we introduce a model in which Loyal customers buy one brand and do not strategically time purchases, while Bargain Hunters always pay the lowest price...

We use a large dataset on retail pricing to document that a sizeable portion of the cross-sectional variation in the price at which the same good trades in the same period and in the same market is due to the fact that stores that are, on average, equally expensive set persistently different...