Imperfect Competition and Sticky Prices

Imperfect Competition and Sticky Prices

Author: N. Gregory Mankiw

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 9780262631334

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These two volumes bring together a set of important essays that represent a "new Keynesian" perspective in economics today. This recent work shows how the Keynesian approach to economic fluctuations can be supported by rigorous microeconomic models of economic behavior. The essays are grouped in seven parts that cover costly price adjustment, staggering of wages and prices, imperfect competition, coordination failures, and the markets for labor, credit, and goods. An overall introduction, brief introductions to each of the parts, and a bibliography of additional papers in the field round out this valuable collection.Volume 1 focuses on how friction in price setting at the microeconomic level leads to nominal rigidity at the macroeconomic level, and on the macroeconomic consequences of imperfect competition, including aggregate demand externalities and multipliers. Volume 2 addresses recent research on non-Walrasian features of the labor, credit, and goods markets. Contributors George A Akerlof, Costas Azariadis, Laurence Ball, Ben S. Bernanke, Mark Bits, Olivier J. Blanchard, Alan S. Blinder, John Bryant, Andrew S. Caplin, Dennis W. Carlton, Stephen G. Cecchetti, Russell Cooper, Peter A. Diamond, Gary Fethke, Stanley Fischer, Robert E. Hall, Oliver Hart, Andrew John, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Alan B. Krueger, David M. Lilien, Ian M. McDonald, N. David Mankiw, Arthur M. Okun, Andres Policano, David Romer, Julio J. Rotemberg, Garth Saloner, Carl Shapiro, Andrei Shleifer, Robert M. Solow, Daniel F. Spulber, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Lawrence H. Summers, John Taylor, Andrew Weiss, Michael Woodford, Janet L. Yellen


Gains from Price Rigidity

Gains from Price Rigidity

Author: Kazuo G. Nishimura

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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This paper shows that there are substantial gains from price rigidity in an imperfectly competitive economy. Firms can increase their profits by agreeing some markets as markets of long-term contracts, of which prices are determined in advance to other spot market prices. Although they determine prices non-cooperatively in both markets, the mutual commitment making some markets' prices predetermined induces a price-price spiral between firms, which results in substantial gains for both firms. These gains outweigh the cost of inflexibility arising from price rigidity even though demand fluctuation is large and marginal cost is increasing.


Imperfect Competition, Differential Information, and Microfoundations of Macroeconomics

Imperfect Competition, Differential Information, and Microfoundations of Macroeconomics

Author: Kiyohiko G. Nishimura

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780198290391

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This volume links a microeconomic model of imperfectly informed firms and unions in monopolistic competition to a general theory of wage- and price-setting in a macroeconomic model. The analysis is based on a profit maximization and rational behaviour and is thus in line with the newly emerged New Keynesian approach in its emphasis on the microeconomic foundation of macroeconomics. The volume goes on to explain three stylized facts in macroeconomics: nominal rigidity, real rigidity, and cost-oriented prices, presented in a coherent New Keynesian framework. The analysis also provides new insight into the role of competition in an economy with imperfectly and differentially informed firms. It shows that increased competition may increase nominal as well as real price rigidity and increased volatility of investment.


Price Rigidity

Price Rigidity

Author: Torben M. Andersen

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 9780198287605

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The price adjustment process is crucial to almost any macroeconomic issue. Current macroeconomic literature features widely different models ranking from instantaneous price adjustment to completely rigid prices. Professor Andersen provides a comprehensive analysis of reasons why prices may fail to adjust instantaneously to changes in market conditions. This unified treatment will allow the reader to understand the mechanisms at work without becoming lost in technical details. This volume covers both real and nominal price rigidities and integrates existing results from the literature with new results on causes for failures of price adjustment. The analysis of real price rigidities includes inventories, customer markets, search and collusive behaviour. Due to the focus on macroeconomic implications, the analysis of nominal price rigidities is extensive and includes menu costs, informational problems, asynchronized price setting as well as the interaction between price and wage setting. Professor Andersen's own theoretical work on imperfect information, a prime source of price and wage rigidity, is given prominence in the book. The volume is thus a combination of a valuable survey of the literature, and an original expression of future possible research avenues.