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Inventories in a Competitive Environment

Benjamin Bental; Benjamin Eden

Journal of Political Economy 1993

Trade is sequential: Buyers arrive in batches, and each batch completes trade before the next arrives. Producers allocate the available supply among all potential batches of buyers. Inventories accumulate whenever a batch does not arrive. Shocks to cost and demand are serially independent. There is a stationary relationship between inventories and prices with the following properties. Larger beginning-of-period inventories tend to depress prices. Inventories are positively serially correlated. A unit increase in inventories reduces output by less than one unit. An increase in inventories leads to an increase in the price spread. Output tends to vary more than sales.

DOI
10.1086/261907
Volume
101 (5)
Pages
863-886
Language
en
Export
BibTeX
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