quot;Pluralquot; distribution systems are often found in industrial markets. Although transaction cost analysis has been successfully applied to understanding decisions about distribution systems, these plural forms have been virtually ignored in extant empirical work. Critics suggest that...

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...

A transaction cost approach is used to investigate a manufacturer's policy towards exclusive territory dealers who bootleg (sell across their assigned territories). We show that optimal enforcement policies will generally tolerate some level of bootlegging. This tolerance is a natural...

We study item-pricing laws (which require that each item in a store be individually marked with a price sticker) and examine and quantify their costs and benefits. On the cost side, we argue that item-pricing laws increase the retailers’ costs, forcing them to raise prices. We test this...

We study the implications of rational inattention for individual price dynamics. Analyzing scanner data that cover 29 product categories over a eight-year period from a large Mid-western supermarket chain, we uncover a surprising regularity in the data--small price increases occur more...

Analyzing a large weekly retail transaction price dataset, we uncover a surprising regularity—small price increases occur more frequently than small price decreases for price changes of up to about 10 cents, while there is no such asymmetry for larger price changes. The asymmetry holds for the...