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- November 2024
- Article
Price Discounts and Cheapflation During the Post-Pandemic Inflation Surge
By: Alberto Cavallo and Oleksiy Kryvtsov
We study how within-store price variation changes with inflation, and whether households exploit it to attenuate the inflation burden. We use micro price data for food products sold by 91 large multi-channel retailers in ten countries between 2018 and 2024. Measuring... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Markups and Cost Pass-through Along the Supply Chain
By: Santiago E. Alvarez, Alberto Cavallo, Alexander MacKay and Paolo Mengano
We study markups and pricing strategies along the supply chain. Our unique dataset combines detailed price and cost information from a large global manufacturer with matched retail prices collected online for the period July 2018 through June 2023. We show that total... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Finance Without Exotic Risk
By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Rafael La Porta and Andrei Shleifer
We address the joint hypothesis problem in cross-sectional asset pricing by using measured analyst expectations of earnings growth. We construct a firm-level measure of Expectations Based Returns (EBRs) that uses analyst forecast errors and revisions and shuts down any... View Details
- July 2024 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
Dynamic Pricing at Wendy’s: Where’s the Beef?
By: Elie Ofek, Alicia Dadlani and Martha Hostetter
In early 2024, Wendy’s new CEO announced on an earnings call that the company would install digital menus in its US locations so it could begin testing dynamic pricing—changing prices up or down in response to shifts in supply and demand – as well as allow engaging in... View Details
- June 2024
- Article
Inflation with COVID Consumption Baskets
By: Alberto Cavallo
The Covid-19 pandemic led to changes in expenditure patterns that introduced significant bias in the measurement of Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation. Using publicly-available data on card transactions, I updated the official CPI weights and re-calculated inflation... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Pricing of Climate Risk Insurance: Regulation and Cross-Subsidies
By: Ishita Sen, Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva and Sangmin Oh
We study the consequences of state-level price (rate) regulation for U.S. homeowners' insurance, a $15 trillion market that provides households protection against climate losses. Using two distinct identification strategies and novel data on regulatory filings and ZIP... View Details
- April 8, 2024
- Article
Loyalty Programs May Limit Competition, and They Could Be Pushing Prices up for Everyone
By: Alexandru Nichifor and Scott Duke Kominers
- April 2024
- Article
Pay-As-You-Go Insurance: Experimental Evidence on Consumer Demand and Behavior
By: Raymond Kluender
Pay-as-you-go contracts reduce minimum purchase requirements which may increase market participation. We randomize the introduction and price(s) of a novel pay-as-you-go contract to the California auto insurance market where 17 percent of drivers are uninsured. The... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Valuing Stocks With Earnings
By: Sebastian Hillenbrand and Odhrain McCarthy
We show that commonly used aggregate earnings are several times as volatile as stock prices
over the last three decades. Movements in the price-earnings ratio are thus entirely explained by
earnings growth and unrelated to future returns. As an alternative to the... View Details
- August 2023
- Background Note
Pricing and Customer Psychology
By: Elie Ofek
This note provides an overview of how psychological principles may be used as part of a seller’s pricing strategy. The note defines the concept of psychological pricing and explains the motivations for firms to engage in it. Prominent practices and tactics, with... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Algorithm Failures and Consumers' Response: Evidence from Zillow
By: Isamar Troncoso, Runshan Fu, Nikhil Malik and Davide Proserpio
In November 2021, Zillow announced the closure of its iBuyer business. Popular media largely attributed this to a failure of its proprietary forecasting algorithm. We study the response of consumers to Zillow’s iBuyer business closure. We show that after the iBuyer... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
Before or After? The Effects of Payment Decision Timing in Pay-What-You-Want Contexts
By: Raghabendra P. KC, Vincent Mak and Elie Ofek
We study how payment decision timing—before versus after product delivery—influences consumer payment under pay-what-you-want pricing. We focus on situations where there is minimal change in consumer uncertainty regarding the product before versus after receiving it.... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Market for Sharing Interest Rate Risk: Quantities and Asset Prices
By: Umang Khetan, Jane Li, Ioana Neamtu and Ishita Sen
We study the extent of interest rate risk sharing across the financial system using granular positions and transactions data in interest rate swaps. We show that pension and insurance (PF&I) sector emerges as a natural counterparty to banks and corporations: overall,... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
An Economic Framework for Vaccine Prioritization
By: Mohammad Akbarpour, Eric Budish, Piotr Dworczak and Scott Duke Kominers
We propose an economic framework for determining the optimal allocation of a scarce supply of vaccines that become gradually available during a public health crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Agents differ in observable and unobservable characteristics, and the... View Details
- December 2022
- Case
The Magic of Marks & Spencer Food
By: David E. Bell, Natalie Kindred and Damien McLoughlin
- September 2022 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Navya: Steering toward a Driverless Future
By: Julian De Freitas, Elie Ofek, Shaun Ingledew and Tonia Labruyere
In 2022, Sophie Desormière arrived at French roboshuttle producer Navya, tasked with charting a new course in a challenging sector. The company, which had recently listed on the Paris Stock Exchange, was burning through cash reserves and needed to transform the promise... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Confidence, Self-Selection and Bias in the Aggregate
By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan Oprea
The influence of behavioral biases on aggregate outcomes like prices and allocations depends in part on self-selection: whether rational people opt more strongly into aggregate interactions than biased individuals. We conduct a series of betting market, auction and... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Product2Vec: Leveraging Representation Learning to Model Consumer Product Choice in Large Assortments
By: Fanglin Chen, Xiao Liu, Davide Proserpio and Isamar Troncoso
We propose a method, Product2Vec, based on representation learning, that can automatically learn latent product attributes that drive consumer choices, to study product-level competition when the number of products is large. We demonstrate Product2Vec’s... View Details
- June 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Dollar Tree: Breaking the Buck
By: Jill Avery and Marco Bertini
For thirty-five years, Dollar Tree, a discount retail chain selling general merchandise, had held its fixed price point steady, pricing all of its household items, food, stationery, books, seasonal items, gifts, toys, and clothing that made up its diverse and... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Retail Investors’ Contrarian Behavior Around News, Attention, and the Momentum Effect
By: Cheng (Patrick) Luo, Enrichetta Ravina, Marco Sammon and Luis M. Viceira
Using a large panel of U.S. brokerage accounts trades and positions, we show that a large fraction of retail investors trade as contrarians after large earnings surprises, especially for loser stocks, and that such contrarian trading contributes to post earnings... View Details