Asking About Prices A New Approach To Understanding Price Stickiness
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Asking About Prices
Author: Alan Blinder
language: en
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Release Date: 1998-01-08
Why do consumer prices and wages adjust so slowly to changes in market conditions? The rigidity or stickiness of price setting in business is central to Keynesian economic theory and a key to understanding how monetary policy works, yet economists have made little headway in determining why it occurs. Asking About Prices offers a groundbreaking empirical approach to a puzzle for which theories abound but facts are scarce. Leading economist Alan Blinder, along with co-authors Elie Canetti, David Lebow, and Jeremy B. Rudd, interviewed a national, multi-industry sample of 200 CEOs, company heads, and other corporate price setters to test the validity of twelve prominent theories of price stickiness. Using everyday language and pertinent scenarios, the carefully designed survey asked decisionmakers how prominently these theoretical concerns entered into their own attitudes and thought processes. Do businesses tend to view the costs of changing prices as prohibitive? Do they worry that lower prices will be equated with poorer quality goods? Are firms more likely to try alternate strategies to changing prices, such as warehousing excess inventory or improving their quality of service? To what extent are prices held in place by contractual agreements, or by invisible handshakes? Asking About Prices offers a gold mine of previously unavailable information. It affirms the widespread presence of price stickiness in American industry, and offers the only available guide to such business details as what fraction of goods are sold by fixed price contract, how often transactions involve repeat customers, and how and when firms review their prices. Some results are surprising: contrary to popular wisdom, prices do not increase more easily than they decrease, and firms do not appear to practice anticipatory pricing, even when they can foresee cost increases. Asking About Prices also offers a chapter-by-chapter review of the survey findings for each of the twelve theories of price stickiness. The authors determine which theories are most popular with actual price setters, how practices vary within different business sectors, across firms of different sizes, and so on. They also direct economists' attention toward a rationale for price stickiness that does not stem from conventional theory, namely a strong reluctance by firms to antagonize or inconvenience their customers. By illuminating how company executives actually think about price setting, Asking About Prices provides an elegant model of a valuable new approach to conducting economic research.
Producer and Organizational Decision-Making
Behavioral economics may be losing its way by basing its analyses essentially on consumers and individuals alone, even though the results are also used to guide producers and other organizations. Producer and Organizational Decision-Making do not always share the same shortcomings as those of consumers and other individuals, according to Hugh Schwartz. Consider the achievements of entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, whose behavior seems to have been quite contrary to the findings of behavioral economics. Schwartz argues that we need to examine the behavior of organizations--producers, non-profits and government entities--if we are to understand decisions of society as contexts vary and the size of organizations and their relative importance change. Join the author as he offers a history, analysis and critique of behavioral economics and some advice, perhaps controversial, on how to revitalize the field.
Handbook of Pricing Research in Marketing
Pricing is an essential aspect of the marketing mix for brands and products. Further, pricing research in marketing is interdisciplinary, utilizing economic and psychological concepts with special emphasis on measurement and estimation. This unique Handbook provides current knowledge of pricing in a single, authoritative volume and brings together new cutting-edge research by established marketing scholars on a range of topics in the area. The environment in which pricing decisions and transactions are implemented has changed dramatically, mainly due to the advent of the Internet and the practices of advance selling and yield management. Over the years, marketing scholars have incorporated developments in game theory and microeconomics, behavioral decision theory, psychological and social dimensions and newer market mechanisms of auctions in their contributions to pricing research. These chapters, specifically written for this Handbook, cover these various developments and concepts as applied to tackling pricing problems. Academics and doctoral students in marketing and applied economics, as well as pricing-focused business practitioners and consultants, will appreciate the state-of-the-art research herein.