Asking About Prices
Asking About Prices

Author: Alan Blinder

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 1998-01-08

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 1610440684

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Why do consumer prices and wages adjust so slowly to changes in market conditions? The rigidity or stickiness of price setting in business is central to Keynesian economic theory and a key to understanding how monetary policy works, yet economists have made little headway in determining why it occurs. Asking About Prices offers a groundbreaking empirical approach to a puzzle for which theories abound but facts are scarce. Leading economist Alan Blinder, along with co-authors Elie Canetti, David Lebow, and Jeremy B. Rudd, interviewed a national, multi-industry sample of 200 CEOs, company heads, and other corporate price setters to test the validity of twelve prominent theories of price stickiness. Using everyday language and pertinent scenarios, the carefully designed survey asked decisionmakers how prominently these theoretical concerns entered into their own attitudes and thought processes. Do businesses tend to view the costs of changing prices as prohibitive? Do they worry that lower prices will be equated with poorer quality goods? Are firms more likely to try alternate strategies to changing prices, such as warehousing excess inventory or improving their quality of service? To what extent are prices held in place by contractual agreements, or by invisible handshakes? Asking About Prices offers a gold mine of previously unavailable information. It affirms the widespread presence of price stickiness in American industry, and offers the only available guide to such business details as what fraction of goods are sold by fixed price contract, how often transactions involve repeat customers, and how and when firms review their prices. Some results are surprising: contrary to popular wisdom, prices do not increase more easily than they decrease, and firms do not appear to practice anticipatory pricing, even when they can foresee cost increases. Asking About Prices also offers a chapter-by-chapter review of the survey findings for each of the twelve theories of price stickiness. The authors determine which theories are most popular with actual price setters, how practices vary within different business sectors, across firms of different sizes, and so on. They also direct economists' attention toward a rationale for price stickiness that does not stem from conventional theory, namely a strong reluctance by firms to antagonize or inconvenience their customers. By illuminating how company executives actually think about price setting, Asking About Prices provides an elegant model of a valuable new approach to conducting economic research.

The Economy in its house
The Economy in its house

Author: Marcel Aucoin

Publisher: Iggybook

Published: 2019-12-15T00:00:00+01:00

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 2379791066

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The title ― The Economy in its House ― echoes Xenophon’s book, Œconomicus, which focuses on the relationship of a house with its environment rather than on trade. It also makes reference to a question from Socrates: "What is a house?". It is by striving to explore these relationships and questions, reflecting the conditions of our time, that we have concluded that the economy is in its house ― and that changes everything. Indeed, this leads us to establish a foundation ― new but grafted onto ancient roots ― for economics. By integrating into our theory the unpredictable environment, we provide economists with a framework to address the multiple issues that arise not only in our common home, the Earth, but also to all other houses. Our model is based on the hypothesis of the random nature of the economy, which brings us closer to modern physics and its methods. On these pillars, our model abstracts economic agents and focuses attention on the interconnected constituents of the house, both their mutual statistical relationships, and those they have with the environment. The covariance matrix that retraces such relationships indicates how the environment disrupts, on average, each constituent during a period. This gives the possibility to explore the destinies of the houses in the short, middle or long run, through crises and changing perspectives of ruin. It makes it possible to identify three essential variables: the growth factor, the growth energy, and finally the prices’ root, which is also the weight of the unit of account and an anti-ruin coefficient. One of the characteristics of modern houses is that, among their constituents, positive covariances outweigh negative covariances. Hence their growth: we explore its links with the reduction of inequalities, and its pathologies: pollution and depletion of resources. We shows how we can fight against crises and inequalities through greater solidarity. We show that one can model any house by use of a miniature house ― its soul ― with two components (the hearth and the roof), and three guiding parameters: exposure to hazards, security, and performance. With these guides, one expresses all the macroeconomic variables relative to a house. These are preserved by passing from a house ― whatever its importance ― to its soul. The wealth of the results obtained shows that the path open must allow economists to go farther and safer in their work while also enabling a broader public to better understand what the economy is.

Introductory Macroeconomics & Indian Economic Development ( A Textbook for Class XII)
Introductory Macroeconomics & Indian Economic Development ( A Textbook for Class XII)

Author: Ritvik Tolumbia

Publisher: BlueRose Publishers

Published: 2020-04-22

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13:

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This Economics Textbook is designed to provide comprehensive coverage of the syllabus for students, presented in a logical and systematic manner. It includes numerous diagrams and schedules with clear explanations, making complex concepts easy to understand. Additionally, to help students go beyond the basic knowledge of the subject matter, 'An Extra Mile' section is included at the end of each chapter. The exercises are structured in a way that follows the examination pattern and includes various types of questions such as remembering, reason-based, previous year CBSE questions, information-based and concept-based questions, including NCERT questions. With these features, this textbook is an ideal resource for students who want to excel in Economics.