Optimal Price Setting Research Articles

A Puzzle of Microstructure Market Maker Models

This study addresses the empirical viability of microstructure models of dealer price setting. New evidence is presented rejecting these models' specifications of how information asymmetry and inventory accumulation affect dealer pricing. This rejection is consistent with those of other dealer-level empirical studies. This study suggests a new modeling option may be to reconsider optimal price setting while relaxing assumptions that specify incoming orders as the only component through which dealer inventories evolve. This approach is consistent with inventory evolution data and with general equilibrium models' assumptions about currency markets.

Optimal Monetary Policy in an Optimizing Stochastic Dynamic Model with Sticky Prices

Recently macroeconomic researchers have begun studying models of optimal monetary policy within the Real Business Cycle (RBC) framework. A standard RBC model is augmented by New Keynesian elements like sticky prices and monopolistically competitive firms. The monetary authority acts as a social planner maximizing the utility of a representative agent while at the same time taking care of the optimal price setting behavior of the firms via an implementation constraint. King/Wolman (1999) analyze the outcome of such a model with respect to the appropriate monetary policy of the central bank. They conclude that the central bank achieves a complete stabilization of the price level. Inflation is not only constant at the steady state but also through time. It is shown that this very special result does not hold under alternative preference specifications that allow for a richer set of substitution effects between consumption and labor.

State Dependent Pricing and Dynamics of Business Cycles

The nature of price dynamics has long been thought important for the origin and duration of business cycles. To investigate this topic, we construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium macroeconomic model in which monopolistically competitive firms face fixed costs of changing the nominal prices of final goods. These prices are thus changed infrequently and discretely. The framework captures major features of the price dynamics stressed by the New Keynesian research program, particularly work on (s,S) pricing rules. However, by treating firms as heterogenous with respect to the size of fixed costs of price adjustment, we are able to study a wider range of issues than in the prior literature. For example, we explore how the nature of optimal price-setting depends on (i) the extent of persistence of variations in the money stock and (ii) the interest elasticity of money demand. Further, our model can be used to study a wide range of aspects of the positive and normative economics of monetary policy. We illustrate these topics by considering the consequences of changing the rate of inflation and by evaluating alternative policy rules.