[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecinqu/v32y1994i4p562-81.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Why Do Firms Contrive Shortages? The Economics of Intentional Mispricing

Author

Listed:
  • Haddock, David D
  • McChesney, Fred S
Abstract
Given buyers' product-specific information capital, firms may increase long-run profits by underpricing (rationing) rather than clearing markets when demands or costs rise transitorily. To minimize resulting shortages' costs, sellers predictably would distinguish among customer groups, managing any queues of disappointed loyal buyers that materialized (but largely ignoring transitory buyer queues), and would discourage resale. Unlike other shortage models, short-run excess demand necessarily implies neither buyers who prefer consuming in groups nor waiting costs that are negligible. Any sense of unfair price increases would arise endogenously from sellers' failures to value appropriately customers' otherwise prudent informational investments. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Haddock, David D & McChesney, Fred S, 1994. "Why Do Firms Contrive Shortages? The Economics of Intentional Mispricing," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 32(4), pages 562-581, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:32:y:1994:i:4:p:562-81
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Levy, Daniel & Dutta, Shantanu & Bergen, Mark & Venable, Robert, 1998. "Price Adjustment at Multiproduct Retailers," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 19(2), pages 81-120.
    2. Levy, Daniel & Bergen, Mark & Dutta, Shantanu & Venable, Robert, 1997. "The Magnitude of Menu Costs: Direct Evidence from Large U.S. Supermarket Chains," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 112(3), pages 791-824.
    3. Tabarrok, Alexander, 2008. "The hot-toy problem," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 67(2), pages 512-516, August.
    4. Dutta, Shantanu & Bergen, Mark & Levy, Daniel, 2002. "Price flexibility in channels of distribution: Evidence from scanner data," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 26(11), pages 1845-1900, September.
    5. Evan L. Porteus & Hyoduk Shin & Tunay I. Tunca, 2010. "Feasting on Leftovers: Strategic Use of Shortages in Price Competition Among Differentiated Products," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 12(1), pages 140-161, November.
    6. Julio J. Rotemberg, 2011. "Fair Pricing," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 9(5), pages 952-981, October.
    7. Gil S. Epstein, 2007. "Production, inventory and waiting time," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(6), pages 579-589.
    8. M. Northrup Buechner, 2018. "A comment on the law of supply and demand," The Journal of Philosophical Economics, Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, vol. 11(2), pages 67-80, May.
    9. Dwight R. Lee & Richard B. McKenzie, 1998. "How the Client Effect Moderates Price Competition," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 64(3), pages 741-752, January.
    10. Mark Zbaracki & Mark Bergen & Daniel Levy & Mark Ritson, 2005. "Beyond the Cost of Price Adjustment: Investments in Pricing Capital," Working Papers 2005-03, Bar-Ilan University, Department of Economics.
    11. Kwang-Sook Huh, 2008. "Strategic Price Decision Inducing Consumer Rationing: Theory and Evidence," Korean Economic Review, Korean Economic Association, vol. 24, pages 233-257.
    12. Micha Gisser & James E. McClure & Giray Okten & Gary Santoni, 2009. "Some Anomalies Arising from Bandwagons that Impart Upward Sloping Segments to Market Demand," Econ Journal Watch, Econ Journal Watch, vol. 6(1), pages 21-34, January.
    13. Daniel K. Benjamin, 2010. "Armen Alchian on Evolution, Information, and Cost: The Surprising Implications of Scarcity," Chapters, in: Ross B. Emmett (ed.), The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics, chapter 14, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    14. Hassin, Refael & Roet-Green, Ricky, 2018. "Cascade equilibrium strategies in a two-server queueing system with inspection cost," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 267(3), pages 1014-1026.
    15. Agostini, Claudio & Saavedra, Eduardo H., 2013. "Chile: Port congestion and efficient rationing in cargo transfer operations," Revista CEPAL, Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), December.
    16. Reiffen, David, 1999. "On the equivalence of resale price maintenance and quantity restrictions," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 17(2), pages 277-288, February.
    17. Henk Folmer & Auke Leen, 2013. "Why do successful restaurants not raise their prices?," Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences, Springer, vol. 6(2), pages 81-90, July.
    18. Lennon, Conor & Shohfi, Tom, 2021. "Unbridled spirit: Illicit markets for bourbon whiskey," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 191(C), pages 1025-1045.
    19. Dwight R. Lee & Robert D. Tollison, 2009. "Queuing, Conflict, and Violence," Journal of Private Enterprise, The Association of Private Enterprise Education, vol. 25(Fall 2009), pages 51-68.

    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:oup:ecinqu:v:32:y:1994:i:4:p:562-81. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/weaaaea.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.