Precautionary Price Stickiness

41 Pages Posted: 2 Jun 2014

See all articles by James S. Costain

James S. Costain

Banco de España - Research Department

Anton Nakov

European Central Bank (ECB); CEPR

Multiple version iconThere are 3 versions of this paper

Date Written: March 2014

Abstract

This paper proposes a model in which retail prices are sticky even though firms can always change their prices at zero cost. Instead of imposing a "menu cost", we assume that more precise decisions are more costly. In equilibrium, firms optimally make some errors in price-setting, thus economizing on managerial time. Both the time cost of choice, and the resulting risk of errors, give firms an incentive to leave their prices unchanged until they perceive a sufficiently large deviation from the optimal price.

We show that pricing errors help explain several "puzzles" from microdata: (1) small and large price changes coexist; (2) the probability of price adjustment is largely independent of the time since last adjustment; (3) the size of the adjustment is largely independent of the time since last adjustment; (4) extreme prices are younger than prices near the center of the distribution; (5) the coefficient of variation of prices is greater than that of costs; (6) the standard deviation of price adjustments is largely independent of the inflation rate, and the fraction of price increases converges slowly towards 100% as inflation rises.

However, on the macroeconomic side, pricing errors do little to explain the real effects of monetary shocks. Since firms making sufficiently large errors always choose to adjust, a nominal shock generates a strong, inflationary "selection effect". Thus, like Golosov and Lucas (2007), we find that money shocks are almost neutral, but our model fits microdata better than their specification does.

Keywords: (S,s), adjustment, logit equilibrium, near-rational behavior, Nominal rigidity, state-dependent pricing

JEL Classification: C72, D81, E31

Suggested Citation

Costain, James S. and Nakov, Anton A., Precautionary Price Stickiness (March 2014). CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP9912, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2444855

James S. Costain (Contact Author)

Banco de España - Research Department ( email )

Alcala 50
28014 Madrid
Spain

Anton A. Nakov

European Central Bank (ECB) ( email )

Sonnemannstrasse 22
Frankfurt am Main, 60314
Germany

CEPR ( email )

London
United Kingdom

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