Bargaining, Search, and Price Dispersion: Evidence from the Live Hogs Market

Bargaining, Search, and Price Dispersion: Evidence from the Live Hogs Market

Using unique panel data on individual transactions between buyers and sellers in the spot market for live hogs, we found a large degree of intra-day price dispersion. Motivated by this empirical puzzle, we offer an explanation which is rooted in the bargaining with search theory. We formulate three hypotheses involving the role of farmers’ search cost, bargaining parties’ patience, and asymmetr...

Inflation And Relative Price Dispersion: Evidence For Iran

Price Dispersion in the Grocery Market

The proverbial “law of one price” is virtually never empirically valid. Homogeneous goods are often sold at widely different prices by rival firms, even in environments that seem particularly conducive to economic competition. And prices for the same goods often vary over time. The grocery market seems to be one of the prime examples of price dispersion in which there exists price uncertainty. ...

Price and Quality Dispersion in an Offshoring Market: Evidence from Semiconductor Production Services

We study price and quality differences across international intermediate input suppliers. Our uniquely detailed transaction-level data exhibit large price differences across suppliers of observationally identical products, but these price gaps narrow over the product life cycle. We disentangle pure (frictional) price dispersion from unobserved quality differences using a framework in which swit...

Price discrimination and bargaining power in the global vaccine market

Since the 1980s, the market structure of vaccines has become increasingly oligopolistic, and in some cases, monopolistic. Alongside these supply trends, we see the emergence and growth of group procurement schemes on the demand side of the market. National governments and international organizations procure vaccines on behalf of end users. Two such organizations include the UNICEF Supply Divisi...