Firms' Price Choices: Exchanging Insights between Industrial Organization, Marketing Science and Macroeconomics

The concrete and detailed examples of firms' price choices which naturally arise in industrial organization and marketing science can usefully inform macroeconomic models of inflation. At the same time, macroeconomists are compiling stylized facts about price setting which can provide a broad context for more focused investigation. On December 15, 2006, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's Inflation Research Center hosted a conference entitled "Firms' Price Choices: Exchanging Insights between Industrial Organization, Marketing Science, and Macroeconomics." The conference's goal was to foster mutually beneficial exchange between economists from these three fields studying firms' pricing decisions.

The organizers were Jeff Campbell from the Chicago Fed, Jean-Pierre Dubé from the University of Chicago and Aviv Nevo from Northwestern University. The conference program consisted of six invited papers with discussants. The conference papers are now available on the agenda.