We study the effect of menu costs on the pricing behavior of sellers and on the cross-sectional distribution of prices in the search-theoretic model of imperfect competition of Burdett and Judd (1983). We find that, when menu costs are small, the equilibrium is such that sellers follow a (Q,S,s)...

Menu-pricing schemes in restaurants are often based primarily on markup-over-cost methods. More sophisticated techniques make use of ideas about consumer demand as well as cost. We propose an experiment for determining the effect of price on the quantity demanded of a menu item. We ran the...