Working Paper
Sticky prices, coordination and enforcement
Driscoll, John C.; Ito, Harumi (2003)
Price-setting models with monopolistic competition and costs of changing prices exhibit coordination failure: In response to a monetary policy shock, individual agents lack incentives to change prices even when it would be Pareto-improving if all agents did so. The potential welfare gains are in part evaluated relative to a benchmark equilibrium of perfect, costless coordination; in practice, since agents will still have incentives to deviate from the benchmark equilibrium, coordination is likely to require enforcement. We consider an alternative benchmark equilibrium in which coordination is ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2003-30