Market forces meet behavioral biases: cost misallocation and irrational pricing
研究企业混淆固定、沉没和可变成本导致定价扭曲，以及市场力量和学习能否消除这些扭曲。通过模拟企业实验不同成本方法并采用适应性学习调整价格，发现某些市场结构下强化过程会使定价系统性地偏离标准均衡预测。
Psychological and experimental evidence, as well as a wealth of anecdotal examples, suggests that firms may confound fixed, sunk, and variable costs, leading to distorted pricing decisions. This article investigates the extent to which market forces and learning eventually eliminate these distortions. We envision firms that experiment with cost methodologies that are consistent with real‐world accounting practices, including ones that confuse the relevance of variable, fixed, and sunk costs to pricing decisions. Firms follow “naive” adaptive learning to adjust prices and reinforcement learning to modify their costing methodologies. Costing and pricing practices that increase profits are reinforced. In some market structures, but not in others, this process of reinforcement causes pricing practices of all firms to systematically depart from standard equilibrium predictions.