Electronic shelf label (ESL) is an emerging price display technology around the world. While these new technologies require non-trivial investments by the retailer, they also promise significant operational efficiencies in the form of savings in material, labor and managerial costs. The presumed...

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...

Analyzing scanner price data that cover 27 product categories over an eight-year period from a large Mid-western supermarket chain, we uncover a surprising regularity in the data—small price increases occur more frequently than small price decreases. We find that this asymmetry holds for price...

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...

We study different notions of sale and regular prices, and their variability with store pricing-formats. We use data from three large stores with different pricing-formats (EDLP/Hi-Lo/Hybrid) that are located within 1-km radius. Importantly, the data contain both the actual transaction prices...

We study the price rigidity of regular and sale prices, and how it is affected by pricing formats (i.e., pricing strategies). We use data from three large Canadian stores with different pricing formats (Every-Day-Low-Price, Hi-Lo, and Hybrid) that are located within a 1 km radius of each other....