Price Setting in a Leading Swiss Online Supermarket

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

Martin Berka (Massey University) Michael B. Devereux (University of British Columbia) and Thomas Rudolph (University of St.Gallen) analyze Price Setting in a Leading Swiss Online Supermarket.

ABSTRACT: We study a newly released data set of scanner prices for food items in a large Swiss online supermarket. We find that average prices change about every two months, but when we exclude temporary sales, prices are extremely sticky, changing on average once every three years. Non-sale price behavior is broadly consistent with menu cost models of sticky prices. When we focus specifically on the behavior of sale prices, however, we find that the characteristics of price adjustment seems to be substantially at odds with standard theory.