New Keynesian models of price setting under monopolistic competition involve two kinds of inefficiency: the price level is too high because firms ignore an aggregate demand externality, and when there are costs of changing prices, price stickiness may be an equilibrium response to changes in...

Aggregate cost uncertainty, arising from real shocks or unanticipated inflation, reduces the informativeness of prices by scrambling relative and aggregate variations. But when agents can acquire additional information, such increased noise may in fact lead them to become better informed, and...

This paper develops an oligopoly model in which firms first choose capacity and then compete in prices in a series of advance-purchase markets. We show that when the elasticity of demand falls across periods, strong competitive forces prevent firms from utilizing intertemporal price...

A model is provided whereby a monopolist firm chooses to price its product at zero. This outcome is shown to be driven by the assumption of 'free disposal' alongside selection markets (where prices impact on a firm's costs). Free disposal creates a mass point of consumers whose utility from the...

This study tests whether demand responds symmetrically to price increases and decreases--a seemingly obvious proposition under conventional demand theory that has not been rigorously tested. Exploiting rapid expansion in municipal subsidies for child healthcare in a difference-in-differences...

A diversion ratio, which measures the fraction of consumers that switch from one product to an alternative after a price increase, is a central calculation of interest to antitrust authorities for analyzing horizontal mergers. Two ways to measure diversion are: the ratio of estimated cross-price...

We study the private market response to the National School Lunch Program, documenting economically meaningful spillovers to non-recipients. We focus on the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), an expansion of the lunch program under the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Under the CEP,...

The last decade has seen a burst of micro price studies. Many studies analyze data underlying national CPIs and PPIs. Others focus on more granular sub-national grocery store data. We review these studies with an eye toward the role of price setting in business cycles. We summarize with ten...

We analyze a rational-expectations model of information acquisition and price formation in an intermediate- good market: prices and net supply are non-negative, there are no noise traders, and the intermediate good has multiple potential uses. Several of our results differ from the classic...

We analyze a rational-expectations model of price formation in an intermediate-good market under uncertainty. There is a continuum of dyads, each consisting of an upstream party and a downstream party. Both parties can make specific investments at private cost, and there is a machine that either...