This paper studies the relationship between retail gasoline pricing strategies and potential demand. Utilising detailed data on traffic on the German Autobahn and the special case of Bundesautobahntankstellen, the interaction between demand and price competition is studied, as are the changes in...

We investigate asymmetric price responses by considering a unique, highly disaggregate retailer- and product-level time series at a major supermarket chain. We find asymmetry exists, but is limited in scope and there is no evidence of a pervasive chain wide asymmetric pricing strategy. To...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) automates human decisions. Algorithmic pricing, a form of AI, sets prices by a computer. It is now common currency in ride-hailing, travel, drugs, gasoline, online goods---And great price variability characterizes all those settings. However, little is known about...

The nature of manufacturer's suggested retail prices (MSRPs) and whether their effect is pro- or anticompetitive is not well understood. We exploit a policy experiment in which a ban on MSRPs was imposed and then lifted a year later. We show that average prices increased by 2.1 percent as a...

Price comparison websites, where consumers can compare prices at a search cost that is close to zero, have become increasingly common around the world. Using daily information on prices, click-throughs, and the number of retailers for a sample of consumer electronics and durable goods over a...

Increasingly, retailers have access to better pricing technology, especially in online markets. Firms employ automated pricing algorithms that allow for high-frequency price changes. What are the implications for price competition? We develop a model of price competition where firms can differ...

In the last decade, many European countries have seen a sharp increase in the number of automated fueling stations. We study the effect of this process innovation on prices at stations that are automated and their competitors using a difference-in-differences matching strategy. Our estimates...

Sales tax is generally not included in the advertised price quoted to consumers in the United States. In contrast, value added taxes (VAT) are embedded into the price in most other countries. This article investigates how the two different pricing structures and consumers' decision-making...

This paper addresses the effect of horizontal mergers on prices. It is shown that if firms compete in quantities and marginal costs are nondecreasing, any profitable merger failing to generate technological synergies must harm consumers through higher prices, irrespective of entry conditions in...

This paper identifies patterns of cross-sectional and temporal price dispersion-in the Spanish online grocery retail market-and evaluates the extent to which search costs and chain heterogeneity explain such dispersion. We build a data set comprising 836,074 prices for the most popular grocery...