The authors test and confirm that retail gasoline prices respond more quickly to increases than to decreases in crude oil prices. Among the possible sources of this asymmetry are production/inventory adjustment lags and market power of some sellers. By analyzing price transmission at different...

In many industries, the largest firms are most successful in entering and competing in individual markets or submarkets. While this success is often attributed to cost or quality differences, it may also reflect reputation advantages or marketing strategies that benefit firms selling a wider...

Between 1995 and 2004, I find that airline prices fell more than 20% adjusted for inflation. I also show that premia at hub airports declined and that there is now substantially less disparity between the cheaper and more expensive airports than there was a decade ago. Still, I find that prices...

Most customers in electricity markets do not face prices that change frequently to reflect changes in wholesale costs, known as real-time pricing (RTP). We show that not only does time-invariant pricing in competitive markets lead to prices and investment that are not first best, it even fails...

In an unregulated electricity generation market, the capacity of transmission lines will determine the degree to which generators in different locations compete with one another. We show, however, that there may be no relationship between the effect of a transmission line in spurring competition...

A model with costly adjustment of production and costly inventories implies that wholesale gasoline prices will respond with a lag to crude oil cost shocks. Unlike explanations that rely upon menu costs, imperfect information, or long-term buyer/seller relationships, this model predicts that...

Some economists and policy makers have suggested that market allocation of scarce operating licenses, broadcasti ng licenses, and airport "slots," for instance, would lead to their efficient use. This paper demonstrates that a competitive market all ocation of operating licenses, whether...

The authors study dispersion in the prices an airline charges to different passengers on the same route. This variation in fares is substantial: the expected absolute difference in fares between two passengers on a route is 36 percent of the airline's average ticket price. The pattern of...