Heterogeneous search costs enable price discrimination, which I study in the canonical Wolinsky (1986) sequential search setting. Firms observe a public signal of a consumer's search cost before posting a personalized price. The welfare effects of search-cost-based price discrimination depend on...

Retail prices for a product vary across time and places. The sources that drive price dispersion can be grouped into three categories: (i) price differences across markets, (ii) price differences across stores in a market, and (iii) within-store price variation over time. I find there is price...

The relationship between firm markups and inflation remains a topic of contention. Empirical findings suggest that many firms were able to maintain or increase their markups and profits amidst the recent wide-ranging cost shocks. This phenomenon, often referred to as sellers' inflation, raises...

We assess price dispersion in retail markets and its sources over time. Using a product-detailed price database, we document a consistent divergence of prices over time in retail markets in Uruguay: price dispersion increased by 3.1% in fifteen years. Next, we analyze microeconomic and...

Whereas between-retailer price discrepancies are well documented, less is known about price differentiations within a single chain. This article investigates the prevalence and the magnitude of online within-retailer price dispersion over time. Amazon is the US largest online food retailer (and...

COVID-19 has caused substantial disruptions to the airline industry. This paper analyzes the effects of competition variations related to the pandemic on price dispersion. The sample includes ticket information from the DB1B database between 2018Q1 and 2021Q4. The fixed-effect panel instrument...

The literature on liquidity traps suggests that a non-linear version of the new Keynesian model is better suited to capture the complex implications of the zero lower bound. However, our research reveals an exceptional level of price dispersion that exceeds previous empirical estimates by...

We document price differences for identical trips on Uber and Lyft, based on an audit of the two platforms. While price dispersion exists in the market, device-level data show that only 16.1 percent of consumers opening one app also open the other. Our estimates suggest that the modest frictions...

In this paper, we show that prices of homogeneous products may vary widely across different online platforms. We collect data for the 200 most popular hotels in London (UK) and document robust evidence of the existence of price dispersion while booking a hotel room. We then investigate why price...

We investigate the effect of COVID-19 epidemic and the subsequent stay-at-home order on market efficiency in China’s online markets, by comparing the changes in price dispersion around the date of the lockdown with the corresponding changes in the same period in the lunar year of 2019. We find...

We show that standard menu cost models cannot simultaneously reproduce the dispersion in the size of micro-price changes and the extent to which the fraction of price changes increases with inflation in the U.S. time-series. Though the Golosov and Lucas (2007) model generates fluctuations in the...

We leverage a comprehensive dataset of electronic invoices from Chilean firms to document new facts on price dispersion across buyers of manufactured intermediate goods. Over half of firm-to-firm manufacturing sales are accounted for by products that are purchased by more than one buyer in the...

Price comparison websites, where consumers can compare prices at a search cost that is close to zero, have become increasingly common around the world. Using daily information on prices, click-throughs, and the number of retailers for a sample of consumer electronics and durable goods over a...

A price dispersion equation is tested with data from the German hyper-inflation. The equation is derived from a version of Lucas' (1973) and Barro's (1976) partial information-localized market models. In this extension, different excess demand elasticities across commodities imply a testable...

Imperfect and costly information generates price dispersion in the market. This study employs data on housing assets listed for sale on a leading online classified home service in Israel to assess the effect of quality-adjusted housing price dispersion on time-on-market. We develop a model by...

Advertising is an input for many final goods, and broadcast television comprises a significant portion of ad-spending in the U.S. Yet advertisers face different costs when purchasing national television ads. We seek to confirm empirically whether there are differences in firms' costs to...

We use a large dataset on retail pricing to document that a sizeable portion of the cross-sectional variation in the price at which the same good trades in the same period and in the same market is due to the fact that stores that are, on average, equally expensive set persistently different...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy responses in an economy featuring sectorial heterogeneity in the frequency of price adjustments. It shows that a central bank facing heterogeneous nominal rigidities is more likely to behave less aggressively than in a fully sticky economy. Hence, the...