Production costs play a crucial role in competition policy and price regulation. A shared purpose of both policies is to keep prices close to production costs to the benefit of the consumers and of the society as a whole. The problem is that prices are per product and costs are per firm. So, the...

Part I of this Comment describes the OPEC practices that form the basis of opponents’ complaints, including OPEC member countries’ efforts to influence the world oil market and help oil producers achieve certain rates of return, as well as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade8...

Unit Pricing Regulation (UPR) was introduced to help consumers make more informed decisions by displaying unit prices in addition to product prices. Despite extensive research on UPR effects on consumers’ perceptions and decisions, much less is known about the impacts on retail stores’ price...

Over the past 20 years the consumer payments system has been transformed as electronic payments such as debit and credit cards have rapidly displaced legacy payment systems, especially checks. At the same time, this growth in the use of electronic payments has triggered increasing government...

A consumer wants to buy one of three different products. An expert observes which of the three products is the best match for the consumer. Under linear prices a monopolistic expert may truthfully reveal, may partially reveal, and may not reveal at all her information. The outcome is...

The paper analyses the reasons for Japan's persistently low inflation since the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy (low inflation conundrum). It is shown that Japan experienced a structural break from a high-growth period with relatively high inflation to a low-growth period with...

Abstract This paper investigates the sensitivity of U.S. economic performance to oil price changes, accounting for changes in the domestic petroleum supply-demand balance over the last decade. A non-linear (asymmetric) autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model is used to estimate the U.S. GDP...