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Sticky Prices, Coordination and Enforcement

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Author Info
John Driscoll (Federal Reserve Board)
Harumi Ito (Brown University and NBER)

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Abstract

Price-setting models with monopolistic competition and costs of changing prices exhibit coordination failure: in response to a monetary policy shock, individual agents lack incentives to change prices even when it would be Pareto-improving if all agents did so. The potential welfare gains are in part evaluated relative to a benchmark equilibrium of perfect, costless coordination; in practice, since agents will still have incentives to deviate from the benchmark equilibrium, coordination is likely to require enforcement. We consider an alternative benchmark equilibrium in which coordination is enforced by punishing deviators. This is formally equivalent to modeling agents as a cartel playing a punishment game. We show that this new benchmark implies that the welfare losses from coordination failure are smaller. Moreover, at the new benchmark equilibrium, prices are upwards-flexible but downwards-sticky. These last results suggest that the dynamic behavior of sticky-price models may more generally depend on the kind of imperfect competition assumed.

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Publisher Info
Article provided by Berkeley Electronic Press in its journal Topics in Macroeconomics.

Volume (Year): 3 (2003)
Issue (Month): 1 ()
Pages: 1096-1096
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Handle: RePEc:bep:mactop:v:3:y:2003:i:1:p:1096-1096

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Related research
Keywords: coordination failure menu costs monopolistic competition cartel

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection

References listed on IDEAS
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  1. Abreu, Dilip & Pearce, David & Stacchetti, Ennio, 1986. "Optimal cartel equilibria with imperfect monitoring," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 251-269, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Chari, V V & Kehoe, Patrick J, 1990. "Sustainable Plans," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(4), pages 783-802, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  3. Mankiw, N Gregory, 1985. "Small Menu Costs and Large Business Cycles: A Macroeconomic Model," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 100(2), pages 529-38, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Ball, Laurence & Romer, David, 1990. "Real Rigidities and the Non-neutrality of Money," Review of Economic Studies, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 57(2), pages 183-203, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  5. Susan Athey & Kyle Bagwell & Chris Sanchirico, 1998. "Collusion and Price Rigidity," Working papers 98-23, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Economics.
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  6. Caplin, Andrew & Leahy, John, 1991. "State-Dependent Pricing and the Dynamics of Money and Output," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 106(3), pages 683-708, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  7. Cooper, Russell & John, Andrew, 1988. "Coordinating Coordination Failures in Keynesian Models," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 103(3), pages 441-63, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  8. Alexander L. Wolman, 1999. "Does state-dependent pricing imply coordination failure?," Working Paper 99-05, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. [Downloadable!]
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