We propose a new explanation for price rigidity. If consumers form habits in individual goods, then firms face a time-inconsistency problem. The consumers’ habits imply that low prices in the future help attract customers in the present. Firms would therefore like to promise low prices in the future. But when the future arrives they have an incentive to exploit consumers’ habits and price gouge...

While firms claim to be concerned with consumer reactions to price increases, these often do not cause large reductions in purchases. The model developed here fits this by letting consumers react negatively only when they become convinced that prices are unfair. This can explain price rigidity, though its implications are not identical to those of existing models of costly price adjustment. In ...

this study uses vector error correction model to examine the effects of oilseeds, crude oil and vegetable oil tariffs on vegetable oil consumer price. monthly data sets for the years 2004-2013 and var and vecm models were applied for this study. research findings indicates only a long term equilibrium relation between the study variables .the effect of vegetable oil tariffs on consumer and prod...

the study investigates consumers’ preference for cowpea reflected in the nigerian markets through price discounts and premiums that consumers pay for different cowpea characteristics. the price data used for this study were obtained through a market survey. a common data collection protocol was employed. every month, between october 2009 to december 2010, five cowpea samples per seller were bou...

Diamond's 'paradox' (1971) showed that in a market where consumers search sequentially and have strictly positive search costs the unique price equilibrium is where all firms charge the monopoly price. This paper demonstrates that Diamond's result depends crucially on the assumption of single commodity search and does not persist when the model is generalised to allow multi-commodity search. A ...

Software selection research has so far mainly focused on corporations and often assumed a rational evaluation of selection criteria. Research on consumers’ software selection is still scarce. However, findings from outside IS indicate that consumers’ software selection decisions might be biased by the choice alternatives among which software is selected. In an experiment, this study investigate...