We offer the first direct evidence of an implicit contract in a goods market. The evidence we offer comes from the market for Coca-Cola. We demonstrate that the Coca-Cola Company left a substantial amount of written evidence of its implicit contract with its consumers-a very explicit form of an...

We study the cost of breaching an implicit contract in a goods market, building on a recent study that documented the presence of such a contract in the Coca-Cola market, in the US, during 1886-1959. The implicit contract promised a serving of Coca-Cola of a constant quality (the "real thing"),...

We offer the first direct evidence of an implicit contract in a goods market. The evidence we offer comes from the market for Coca-Cola. We demonstrate that the Coca-Cola Company left a substantial amount of written evidence of its implicit contract with its consumers—a very explicit form of...

We study the cost of breaching an implicit contract in a goods market. Young and Levy (2014) document an implicit contract between the Coca-Cola Company and its consumers. This implicit contract included a promise of constant quality. We offer two types of evidence of the costs of breach. First,...

We thank three anonymous referees for thoughtful comments and suggestions which we found very constructive and helpful. We are particularly grateful to the editor, Al Klevorick, for his advice and painstaking guidance through the multiple revision process. We thank Robert Barsky, Susanto Basu,...

We investigate the relationship between external quality evaluation via experts, firm reputation and product prices and extend the existing empirical literature in three dimensions. First, we empirically account for endogenous reputation effects. An increase in quality has an immediate positive...

Governments spend considerable resources providing goods directly. We show that such behavior may increase welfare when private suppliers have market power. We do this by studying the staggered rollout of hundreds of government milk "ration stores" in Mexico using a proprietary panel of...

This paper presents a case study based on a full dataset related to 31 companies operating in thePolish beer industry during the 1990’s. It discusses the impact of privatisation and of secondaryownership transfers on market outcomes. It confirms the critical role played by foreign...

This introductory essay briefly summarizes the eleven empirical studies of price setting and price adjustment that are included in this special issue. The studies, which use data from several European countries, were conducted as part of the European Central Bank's Inflation Persistence Network.

9-ending prices are a dominant feature of many retail settings, which according to the existing literature, is because consumers perceive them as being relatively low. Are 9-ending prices really lower than comparable non 9-ending prices? Surprisingly, the empirical evidence on this question is...