Pricing technology that allows firms to rapidly adjust prices has two potential benefits. Prices can respond more rapidly to demand shocks, leading to higher revenues. On the other hand, time-varying prices can be used to smooth out demand across periods, reducing costs in markets with capacity...

Increasingly, retailers have access to better pricing technology, especially in online markets. Firms employ automated pricing algorithms that allow for high-frequency price changes. What are the implications for price competition? We develop a model of price competition where firms can differ...

Increasingly, retailers have access to better pricing technology, especially in online markets. Using hourly data from five major online retailers, we show that retailers set prices at regular intervals that differ across firms. In addition, faster firms appear to use automated pricing rules...

When deciding whether to introduce market competition into a regulated industry, a regulator faces an important tradeoff. Market-based prices can provide incentives to allocate resources more efficiently and reduce costs, but the presence of market power may lead to increased markups. We use a...

We characterize the evolution of markups for consumer products in the United States from 2006 to 2019. We use detailed data on prices and quantities for products in more than 100 distinct product categories to estimate demand systems with flexible consumer preferences. We recover markups under...

Pricing algorithms are rapidly transforming markets, from ride-sharing apps, to air travel, to online retail. Regulators and scholars have watched this development with a wary eye. Their focus so far has been on the potential for pricing algorithms to facilitate explicit and tacit collusion....

We characterize the evolution of markups for consumer products in the United States from 2006 to 2019. Using detailed data on prices and quantities for products in more than 100 distinct product categories, we estimate flexible demand systems and recover markups under an assumption that firms...