Description:

Speaker: Amir Abahel

Title: Pricing Methods in 18th-Century England

Abstract: Pricing, i.e. determining how much something costs, is a fundamental aspect of economic activity, but surprisingly little historical research was done on pricing as a practical problem. This paper tries to unearth pricing processes in 18th century England – the methods used by sellers to determine the price of their goods and services, focusing specifically on retailers and pawnbrokers. The evidence from this research suggests that different professions made such decisions in different ways: retailers would hide their selling prices from their customers, leaving them room to make adjustments to individual buyers; pawnbrokers, on the other hand, operated under much greater degrees of social supervision and made pricing decisions without considering the identity of the customer.