English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Paper

Are 'Rockets and Feathers' Caused by Search or Infromational Frictions?

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons51009

Ke,  Changxia
Public Economics, MPI for Tax Law and Public Finance, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Ke, C., & Bayer, R.-C. (2011). Are 'Rockets and Feathers' Caused by Search or Infromational Frictions? Working Paper of the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, 2011-12.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-000F-47AD-E
Abstract
Prices usually adjust much faster when costs increase than when costs decrease. The mechanism driving this "Rockets-and-Feathers" phenomenon is not well understood despite of ample empirical evidence for its existence. We use simple experimental markets with and without consumer search and either privately or publicly observed cost shocks to study this puzzle. In contrast to the theoretical predictions, we observe price dispersion and asymmetric price adjustment in all four settings. We attribute the pricing behavior to bounded rationality and its interaction with adaptive expectations. We conclude that neither search costs nor private information are indispensable for prices to adjust asymmetrically.