This paper presents a model of a rational seller who is actively learning the slope of his demand curve via his pricing strategy. Consequently, this seller optimally experiments with his price. Resulting price patterns show a lot of discreteness (as observed in the data), which has proved to be...

Information frictions play a central role in the formation of household inflation expectations, but there is no consensus about their origins. We address this question with novel evidence from survey experiments. We document two main findings. First, individuals in lower-inflation contexts have...

This article estimates a model of optimal search where consumers learn the distribution of gasoline prices during their driving trips. Our estimation incorporates traffic information and leverages the ordered search environment to recover parameters of the search and learning process using only...

Manufacturers frequently post non-binding public price recommendations, but neither the rationale for this practice nor its impact on prices is well understood. I develop a model in which recommendations signal a manufacturer's production cost to searching consumers, who then form beliefs about...

We show that returns policies increase manufacturer profitability by attenuating price competition between retailers. This effect holds only in the presence of end-user demand uncertainty. The conditions under which a returns policy raises the manufacturer's profit are weaker when retailing is a...

Suppose that consumers incur fixed shopping costs and choose stores according to advertised discounts. Then, the extent to which a store will discount advertised items should increase with the profit from other regularly-priced items. Bookstores customarily advertise discounts on bestsellers....

Gasoline prices in many markets follow a saw-toothed pattern known as an Edgeworth Cycle. Lewis (2009) introduces a novel way of measuring the shape of the cycle, the median change in price, and regresses this against a number of explanatory variables in US markets. Here, we undertake a similar...