This research examines how consumers choose retailers when they are uncertain about store prices prior to shopping. Simulating everyday choice, participants made successive retailer choices where on each occasion they chose a retailer and only then learned product prices. The results of a series...

Search frictions are regarded as a major impediment to active competition in many markets. In some markets, such as financial and retail gasoline, governments and consumer protection agencies call for compulsory price reporting. Consumers could then more easily compare the firms' offers. We...

In this Perspective, I review arguments that broadband providers may be anticompetitively imposing usage-based pricing to protect their profits from “core” services (e.g., voice, video, texting) against the proliferation of “over the top” services and, as such, new price regulation of...

This paper examines regulator concerns that cash-paying consumers pay higher retail prices due to so-called ‘negative pricing' of credit cards that emerge when cardholders face few fees but instead receive discounts, rewards and other inducements for using credit cards for transactions. It is...

Digital maps and navigation applications are considered an essential tool by 70% of smartphone users. As these apps come predominantly free of charge, their contribution to consumer well-being cannot be captured by the common economic measures, like the GDP. This study demonstrates how the...

The radio spectrum that governments license to mobile operators is central to the quality and affordability of mobile broadband services. However, some government policies – inadvertently or not – result in high prices being paid to access spectrum. This empirical study assesses whether high...

Constantly rising expenditures for pharmaceuticals require government intervention in firms' pricing decisions. To this end, reference pricing systems are a frequently employed regulatory mechanism. This paper considers a duopoly market with vertically differentiated firms under different...

We present evidence from 260,000 online auctions of second-hand cars to identify the impact of public reserve prices on auction outcomes. To establish causality, we exploit multiple discontinuities in the relationship between reserve prices and vehicle characteristics to present RD estimates of...

A large body of research has established that exporters do not fully adjust their prices across countries in response to exchange rate movements, but instead allow their markups to vary. But while markups are difficult to observe directly, we show in this paper that inventory-sales ratios...

During the recent period of economic crisis, many countries have introduced scrappage schemes to boost the sale and production of vehicles, particularly of vehicles designed to pollute less. In this paper, we analyze the impact of a particular scheme in Spain (Plan2000E) on vehicle prices and...