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Record W3122883093

Price Dispersion, Inflation and Welfare

2004· article· en· W3122883093 on OpenAlexaff
Allen Head, Alok Kumar

Bibliographic record

VenueSSRN Electronic Journal · 2004
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicEconomic theories and models
Canadian institutionsUniversity of VictoriaQueen's University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEconomicsInflation (cosmology)Price dispersionDispersion (optics)Monetary economicsPrice levelWelfareMonetary policyFriedman ruleReal interest rateRelative priceProducer price indexMisery indexKeynesian economicsMacroeconomicsEconometricsMid priceMarket economy
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Several empirical studies have documented a positive relationship between the rate of inflation and the dispersion of consumer prices. We examine this relationship and the welfare costs of inflation in a monetary economy in which ex ante identical buyers search among prices posted by identical sellers. Under certain conditions, stationary monetary equilibria of our economy necessarily exhibit dispersion of real prices. If the degree of buyers ’ incomplete information about posted prices is fixed exogenously, both price dispersion and the average real price are increasing in the inflation rate. Money creation lowers welfare by increasing the market power of sellers, exacerbating the effects of the inflation tax. As the rate of inflation approaches the Friedman rule, price dispersion and welfare costs both vanish. If households choose the number of prices to observe, then the Friedman rule is not optimal. Rather, up to some point increased inflation lowers the average real price and raises welfare by inducing search and eroding sellers ’ market power.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.004
Threshold uncertainty score0.013

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.183
Teacher spread0.176 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2004
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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