A manufacturer chooses the optimal retail market structure and bilaterally and secretly contracts with each (homogeneous) retailer. In a classic framework without asymmetric information, the manufacturer sells through a single exclusive retailer in order to eliminate the opportunism problem....

9-ending prices, which comprise between 40%–95% of retail prices, are popular because shoppers perceive them as being low. We study whether this belief is justified using scanner price-data with over 98-million observations from a large US grocery-chain. We find that 9-ending prices are higher...

Most of the literature on retail fuel markets find high-frequency and asymmetric price cycles. This is typically explained by the model of Edgeworth price cycles. A key element of this model is that prices fall to marginal costs during a cycle. It seems challenging to address this assumption...

Item‐pricing laws (IPLs) require a price tag on every item sold by a retailer. We study IPLs and assess their efficiency by quantifying their costs and comparing them to previously documented benefits. On the cost side, we posit that IPLs should lead to higher prices because they increase the...

Asymmetric pricing or asymmetric price adjustment is the phenomenon where prices rise more readily than they fall. We offer and provide empirical support for a new theory of asymmetric pricing in wholesale prices. Wholesale prices may adjust asymmetrically in the small but symmetrically in the...

The paper shows that taking inventory control out of the hands of competitive of exclusive retailers and assigning it to a manufacturer increases the value of a supply chain especially for goods whose demand is highly volatile. This is because doing so solves incentive distortions that arise...

The New Trade Theory predicts that international trade lowers prices for consumers and expands the choices available to them. This study shows that both predictions may no longer hold once adjustments in the retail sector are taken into account. I present a new model of retailing in general...

A human subject laboratory experiment compares the real-time market performance of the two most popular auction formats for online ad space, Vickrey- Clarke-Groves (VCG) and Generalized Second Price (GSP). Theoretical predictions made in papers by Varian (2007) and Edelman et al. (2007) seem to...

In this paper, we analyze the strategic role of the recent introduction of national brand products by hard discounters in the French market and its impact both at the retail and manufacturer levels. We use a structural econometric model of vertical relationships that takes into account the...

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...