A Field Study of Price Setting and the Inflationary Process

9810362 Bewley这项拨款支持对许多行业的众多商业人士、销售人员、采购代理和分销商进行采访，以了解产品价格是如何设定的，最重要的是，他们如何适应成本和需求的变化。重点不是价格行为的定量描述，而是谁做出定价决策，买家和卖家如何互动，最重要的是，为什么要做出决策。面试官还会询问通胀预期是如何形成的，以及这些预期如何影响定价决策。该项目的目标是通过提供有关将通货膨胀与一般经济活动联系起来的微观经济机制的知识，促进宏观经济政策分析。该项目还将产生理论和经验假设，这些假设可以使用其他类型的信息，特别是定量数据进行测试。

9810362 Bewley This grant supports interviews of numerous business people, salesmen, purchasing agents, and distributors in many industries in order to learn how product prices are set and above all how they adapt to changes in costs and demand. The emphasis will not be on the quantitative description of price behavior but on who makes pricing decisions, how buyers and sellers interact, and, above all, why decisions are made. The interviewer will also inquire about how inflationary expectations are formed and how these affect pricing decisions. The goal of this project is to contribute to macroeconomic policy analysis by providing knowledge of the microeconomic mechanisms linking inflation to the general level of economic activity. The project will also generate theoretical and empirical hypotheses that could be tested using other kinds of information, and especially quantitative data.