| Theory and Brief Description | Percentage of Firms That Accepted Theory |
| Coordination failure: Firms hold back on price changes, waiting for others to go first | 60.6 |
| Cost-based pricing with lags: Price rises are delayed until costs rise | 55.5 |
| Delivery lags, service, etc.: Firms prefer to vary other product attributes, such as delivery lags, service, or product quality | 54.8 |
| Implicit contracts: Firms tacitly agree to stabilize prices, perhaps out of “fairness” to customers | 50.4 |
| Nominal contracts: Prices are fixed by explicit contracts | 35.7 |
| Costs of price adjustment: Firms incur costs by changing prices | 30.0 |
| Procyclical elasticity: Demand curves become less elastic as they shift in | 29.7 |
| Pricing points: Certain prices (e.g., $9.99) have special psychological significance | 24.0 |
| Inventories: Firms vary inventory stocks instead of prices | 20.9 |
| Constant marginal cost: Marginal cost is flat and markups are constant | 19.7 |
| Hierarchical delays: Bureaucratic delays slow down decisions | 13.6 |
| Judging quality by price: Firms fear customers will mistake price cuts for reductions in quality | 10.0 |
|
Source: Tables 4.3 and 4.4, Alan S. Blinder, “On Sticky Prices: Academic Theories Meet the Real World,’’ in N. G. Mankiw, ed., Monetary Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 117–154. |
|
|---|---|