Precautionary price stickiness

This paper proposes a model in which retail prices are sticky even though firms can always change their prices at zero cost. Instead of imposing a “menu cost”, we assume that more precise decisions are more costly. In equilibrium, firms optimally make some errors in price-setting, thus economizing on managerial time. Both the time cost of choice, and the resulting risk of errors, give firms an incentive to leave their prices unchanged until they perceive a sufficiently costly deviation from the optimal price. We show that this error-prone “control cost” framework helps explain many puzzling observations from microdata. However, on the macroeconomic side, pricing errors do little to explain the real effects of monetary shocks.