Optimal Price Setting With Observation and Menu Costs
研究了企业在同时存在观察成本和菜单成本时的最优定价问题，发现两种成本的互补性会改变仅考虑单一成本模型的预测，并可通过价格观察和调整的统计量识别两种成本的比率。
We study the price-setting problem of a firm in the presence of both observation and menu costs. The firm optimally decides when to "review" costly information on the adequacy of its price. Upon each review, the firm chooses whether to adjust its price, one or more times, before the next price review. Each price adjustment entails paying a menu cost. The firm's choices map into several statistics: the frequency of price reviews, the frequency of price adjustments, the size distribution of price changes, and the hazard rate of price adjustments. The simultaneous presence of observation and menu costs produces complementarities that change the predictions of simpler models featuring one cost only. For instance, infrequent observations may reflect a high menu cost rather than high observation costs: in spite of these complementarities, we show that the ratio of the two costs is identified by several statistics on price observations and adjustments. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.