IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ier/iecrev/v35y1994i1p137-49.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Effect of Price Dispersion on Cost of Living Indexes

Author

Listed:
  • Reinsdorf, Marshall

Abstract

Single good search models imply that mean-preserving increases in the amount of price dispersion reduce expected costs of living of searching consumers. Yet when many goods are consumed, commodity substitution may create a de facto form of fixed sample size search. This leads to the paradoxical result that an increase in price dispersion may reduce nonsearchers' average costs of living more than it does searchers' even--in the fixed sample size search case--if the searchers search only a little. Moreover, mean-and-support-preserving increases in price dispersion may make it optimal to forgo fixed sample size search. Copyright 1994 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

Suggested Citation

  • Reinsdorf, Marshall, 1994. "The Effect of Price Dispersion on Cost of Living Indexes," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 35(1), pages 137-149, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:ier:iecrev:v:35:y:1994:i:1:p:137-49
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0020-6598%28199402%2935%3A1%3C137%3ATEOPDO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y&origin=repec
    File Function: full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wynne, Mark A & Sigalla, Fiona D, 1996. "A Survey of Measurement Biases in Price Indexes," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 10(1), pages 55-89, March.
    2. Rachel Griffith & Ephraim Leibtag & Andrew Leicester & Aviv Nevo, 2009. "Consumer Shopping Behavior: How Much Do Consumers Save?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 23(2), pages 99-120, Spring.
    3. Robert A. Pollak, 1998. "The Consumer Price Index: A Research Agenda and Three Proposals," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 12(1), pages 69-78, Winter.
    4. Ludwig von Auer, 2024. "Inflation Measurement in the Presence of Stockpiling and Smoothing of Consumption," Research Papers in Economics 2024-02, University of Trier, Department of Economics.
    5. John K. Dagsvik & Leif Brubakk, 1998. "Price Indexes for Elementary Aggregates Derived from Behavioral Assumptions," Discussion Papers 234, Statistics Norway, Research Department.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ier:iecrev:v:35:y:1994:i:1:p:137-49. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley-Blackwell Digital Licensing or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deupaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.