We report the results of two sets of experiments comparing decisions made as individuals to those made in groups under majority and unanimity rule. The first setup posed a purely statistical problem devoid of any economic content: Subjects were asked to guess the composition of an (electronic)...

Two laboratory experiments - one a statistical urn problem, the other a monetary policy experiment - were run to test the commonly-believed hypothesis that groups make decisions more slowly than individuals do. Surprisingly, this turns out not to be true there is no significant difference in...

We report the results of two sets of experiments comparing decisions made as individuals to those made in groups under majority and unanimity rule. The first setup posed a purely statistical problem devoid of any economic content: Subjects were asked to guess the composition of an (electronic)...

In an earlier paper (Blinder and Morgan, 2005), we created an experimental apparatus in which Princeton University students acted as ersatz central bankers, making monetary policy decisions both as individuals and in groups. In this study, we manipulate the size and leadership structure of...

We measure the relative contribution of the deviation of real activity from its equilibrium (the gap), “supply-shock” variables, and long-horizon inflation forecasts for explaining the U.S. inflation rate in the post-war period. For alternative specifications for the inflation-driving...

This paper examines 4 million daily price observations for over 1000 consumer electronics products on the price comparison site Shopper.com. We find little support for the notion that prices on the Internet are converging to the “law of one price.” In addition, observed levels of price...

Using data from one of the Internet’s leading price comparison sites for consumer electronics products, we present evidence for the persistence of price dispersion for 36 homogeneous products. The markets for these products are “thick” with an average of over 20 firms selling each product....

Economic theory indicates that E-retailers competing at price comparison sites, such as Shopper.com, must charge prices that cannot be systematically predicted by their rivals. Consistent with theory, we find significant variation in the identity of the lowprice firm as well as the level of the...

Price dispersion is ubiquitous in settings that closely approximate textbook Bertrand competition. We show (Propositions 2 and 3) that only a little bounded rationality among sellers is needed to rationalize such dispersion. A variety of statistical tests, based on data sets from two independent...