One focus of the G20 Summit in Hamburg in July 2017 was the United Nations' sustainable development goals, including those set for the water sector. Despite progress, around 800 million people worldwide do not have adequate access to drinking water. Increasing block tariffs are an instrument...

Beim Hamburger G20-Gipfel im Juli 2017 standen unter anderem die nachhaltigen Entwicklungsziele der Vereinten Nationen im Mittelpunkt - auch im Bereich Wasser: Trotz Fortschritten haben bis heute weltweit circa 800 Millionen Menschen keinen Zugang zu einer adäquaten Trinkwasserversorgung. Ein...

Im Zuge der Deregulierung des Telekommunikations- und Energiesektors hat in Deutschland eine neue Art an Preisregulierung des Netzbereichs Einzug gehalten. Während das eigentliche Produkt beziehungsweise die eigentliche Serviceleistung in einem deregulierten Markt unter Wettbewerb angeboten...

Orthodox price theory turns on flexible prices that move frequently to maintain market-clearing equilibrium. Fixed prices are a source of market imperfections and failures. In the traditional ethics of pricing, by contrast, prices should be set at a just norm and stay there, with only rare...

This paper considers a nonlinear pricing framework with both horizontally and vertically differentiated products. By endogenizing the set of consumers served in the market, we are able to study how increased competition affects nonlinear pricing, in particular the market coverage and quality...

Dispersion in retail prices of identical goods is inconsistent with the standard model of price competition among identical firms, which predicts that all prices will be driven down to cost. One common explanation for such dispersion is the use of a loss-leader strategy, in which a firm prices...

Different markets are cleared by different types of prices—seller-specific prices that are uniform across buyers in some markets, and personalized prices tailored to the buyer in others. We examine a setting in which buyers and sellers make investments before matching in a competitive market....

Prices that end with 9, also known as psychological price points, are common, comprising about 70% of the retail prices. They are also more rigid than other prices. We take advantage of a natural experiment to document an emergence of a new price ending that has the same effects as 9-endings. In...

This paper assesses the productivity growth contributed by the dynamics of exporting firms using firm-level production data of Chinese firms from 2005 to 2009. The authors apply the dynamic Olley-Pakes decomposition with entry and exit proposed by Melitz and Polanec (Dynamic Olley-Pakes...

This paper surveys the current state of global empirical research on price setting behaviour at the firm level to evaluate the adequacy of pricing models used in the macro literature. To that end, it analyses the implications of 25 theoretical models (sticky information, menu costs, time...