ASYMMETRIC PRICE RIGIDITY AND INFLATIONARY BIAS
研究利润最大化的垄断企业在面临通胀和通缩时，因固定调价成本而表现出的非对称调价行为，发现企业更倾向于在通胀时提价而非在通缩时降价，从而产生向上偏差，且通胀不确定性会加剧这一偏差。
When prices adjust in response to market disturbances, they usually do so in discrete jumps. Even when market conditions are changing continuously, prices tend to remain fixed for substantial lengths of time. The commodities fitting this general pattern include most retail goods, services, and intermediate materials.' While it is widely recognized that this pricing pattern holds for both upward and downward adjustments, there is no consensus as to whether these are mirror images for given individual firms. Some scholars believe that upward adjustments are generally more pronounced in magnitude or frequency than downward adjustments. Robert Solow (1980), for instance, believes on the basis of casual observations of some macroeconomic evidence, that commodity prices are sticky downward. Many others, however, view the issue as a completely open question. Phillip Cagan (1979) has documented that prices in the United States tend to rise more in response to increases in demand than they fall in response to corresponding decreases in demand; but he is careful to point out that our present knowledge does not permit us to attribute his evidence to biases in the adjustment behavior of individual firms. Arthur Okun's (1981) research, in contrast, does not point toward an upward bias in prices, yet he, too, agrees that the issue is far from closed.2 It is quite possible, of course, for the adjustment policies of different types of firms to be asymmetric in opposite directions, and for some firms to display perfectly symmetric behavior. It is also possible for a given firm to exhibit asymmetric pricing behavior in response to some kinds of disturbances but not others. If indeed there are firms in the economy which display asymmetric behavior in one situation or another, one ought to be able to establish this both empirically and analytically. This paper examines the adjustment policies of one particular class of business firms: profit-maximizing monopolistic firms with nondecreasing marginal cost functions and nonincreasing elasticity demand functions. The specific disturbances considered in the analysis are changes in the general price level. I show that firms in this class which incur fixed-price-adjustment costs are likely to change their prices less often under deflation than they would under an equivalent inflation. I also demonstrate that the price-adjustment policies of these firms can be biased upward, in the sense that under given inflationary expectations the firms raise their prices more than they would lower them were they to have symmetric deflationary expectations. Finally, I establish that inflationary uncertainty about any core rate of inflation can heighten the upward bias in the firms' adjustment policies. The intuitive explanation for all these findings is that for a given firm the opportunity cost in any period of charging a suboptimal real price is not symmetric around the firm's optimal price. Money illusion is not the cause *Assistant professor of economics, University of Southern California. I am indebted for helpful criticisms and suggestions to Kenneth Arrow, Paul Evans, David Starrett, and an anonymous referee. Responsibility for any errors or omissions is, of course, entirely mine. 'The main exception is organized exchanges for raw materials. 2Cagan's hesitation stems partly from arguments that secret discounting imparts flexibility to actual transaction prices when the quoted prices are rigid. He does concede, however, that even the important empirical study of George Stigler and James Kindahl (1970), undertaken to demonstrate that prices are substantially more flexible than they appear in official statistics, fails to settle the issue. As for Okun's doubts, they appear to be linked to the administered price thesis expounded by Gardiner Means and others (1975). Robert Gordon (1981) provides a splendid summary of the macroeconomic evidence and a survey of related theoretical arguments.