Recent theoretical research on retail pricing dynamics provides an explanation of why retailers periodically put items on sale, even when their costs are unchanged. The authors extend this research to show that more popular items (i.e., those that appeal to a wide range of consumers) are more...

This paper develops a model of competition among multiproduct retailers that is consistent with observed pricing regularities, such as the facts that virtually all products have large mass points in their price distributions and that most deviations fall below these mass points. The basis of the...

This note reexamines the incentive of a regulated monopolist with an unregulated, vertically-related affiliate to discriminate against rivals of the affiliate. Taking Weisman's (1995) model as a framework, I show that his analysis understates the incentive to discriminate. My analysis shows that...

We examine retail price variation across a range of goods and regions of the United States. We find that the typical grocery product has a regular price and stays at that price at least 50% of the time, and that most deviations from that regular price are downward. Temporary discounts or sales,...

Two common features of retailing are that each retailer sells many different products, and that pricing strategies differ across products. This paper extends previous work on single-product retailer competition to a multiproduct setting. Specifically, we derive equilibrium pricing strategies for...

Trading by commodity index traders (CITs) has become an important aspect of financial markets over the past 10 years. We develop an equilibrium model of trader behavior that relates uninformed CIT trading to futures prices. A key implication of the model is that CIT trading reduces the cost of...

In the past decade, many of the world's largest financial exchanges have demutualized, i.e., converted from mutual, not‐for‐profit organizations to publicly‐traded, for‐profit firms. In most cases, these exchanges have substantial responsibilities with respect to enforcing various...

In this paper, I examine how firms' incentives to differentiate their products through the revelation of truthful information about product attributes varies with the distribution of consumer preferences for those attributes. I show that information will tend to be provided for large groups,...