Prices for similar products often differ between retail outlets, leading consumers to actively search for products that meet their needs at the lowest possible price. Prices differ among retailers, and search intensity differs among consumers because search is a costly activity and consumers differ in their costs of search. How variety and the multiproduct nature of retailing affect search cost...

The retail market for electric power does not exhibit the usual behavior of supply and demand. Strict regulation on utility companies restrict the prices consumers can be charged. Allowing the companies to vary the price can afford them the opportunity to pass costs along to the consumers and perhaps help avoid catastrophes such as the California electric crisis. In this paper we analyze a syst...

Producers in a perfectly competitive industry compete to obtain shelf space at the retail level. Barring contract observability problems, slotting allowances are observed in equilibrium. Producers charge a high wholesale price, but give back their profits via up-front payments to retailers. However, if the individual supplier retailer wholesale price terms are unobservable by competitors, then ...

The U.S. apparel industry has been in a transition over the last 20 years: significant consolidation in retail, majority of apparel manufacturing operations moving overseas, and more recently, increasing use of electronic commerce in retail and wholesale trade. This paper aims to review the current state of operations and recent trends across the apparel supply chain in the U.S. We use industry...

This paper addresses the functional structure of agricultural electronic marketplaces, together with associated pricing mechanisms. The analysis of transaction costs suggests that electronic commerce with intermediaries provides more efficient trading environments than electronic marketplace without intermediaries. This indicates that existing intermediary institutions will remain important for...

This chapter presents some results of an econometric analysis (developed in Patrick and Wolak 2001b) of customer-level demands for electricity of large and medium-sized industrial and commercial customers purchasing electricity under half-hourly spot prices and demand charges coincident with system peaks in the England and Wales (E&W) electricity market. These estimates can be used to forecast ...

The American electric power industry is undergoing dramatic changes in the way it is structured and regulated. As of September of 1998, state utility regulators, state legislatures or both in 18 states had made the decision to implement retail competition within 5 years or less. Competition in electricity markets and associated new opportunities for expanded inter-regional electricity trading c...

The paper assesses the welfare effects of different ways of allocating input price risk between a regulated utility, consumers and speculators in a futures market. A risk-averse utility setting a fixed retail price requires a price that exceeds expected marginal cost, unless an efficient futures market is available. The firm bears no risk when input price risk is transferred to consumers, but c...

Consider the pricing decision for a manager at large online retailer, such as Amazon.com, that sells millions of products. The pricing manager must decide on real-time prices for each of these product. Due to the large number of products, the manager must set retail prices without complete demand information. A manager can run price experiments to learn about demand and maximize long run profit...