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Consumer reactions to unobserved changes in price schedules

Publication

Abstract

Economic theory presumes that individuals respond to true marginal prices when deciding on the amount of goods and services they buy and many other economic decisions. This paper presents an experiment that studies repeated consumer purchase and price information updating and acquisition decisions when parameters of the price schedule are serially correlated but unknown.

Subjects have an option to acquire the pricing information at a cost, or otherwise just update their beliefs based on the observation of the total cost of purchase.