Sticky prices

Nominal rigidity, also known as price-stickiness or wage-stickiness, describes a situation in which the nominal price is resistant to change. Complete nominal rigidity occurs when a price is fixed in nominal terms for a relevant period of time. For example, the price of a particular good might be fixed at $10 per unit for a year. Partial nominal rigidity occurs when a price may vary in nominal terms, but not as much as it would if perfectly flexible. For example, in a regulated market there might be limits to how much a price can change in a given year.

If we look at the whole economy, some prices might be very flexible and others rigid. This will lead to the aggregate price level (which we can think of as an average of the individual prices) becoming "sluggish" or "sticky" in the sense that it does not respond to macroeconomic shocks as much as it would if all prices were flexible. The same idea can apply to nominal wages. The presence of nominal rigidity is an important part of macroeconomic theory since it can explain why markets might not reach equilibrium in the short run or even possibly the long run. In his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes argued that nominal wages display downward rigidity, in the sense that workers are reluctant to accept cuts in nominal wages. This can lead to involuntary unemployment as it takes time for wages to adjust to equilibrium, a situation he thought applied to the Great Depression.

There is now a considerable amount of evidence about how long price-spells last, and it suggests that there is a considerable degree of nominal price rigidity in the "complete sense" of prices remaining unchanged. A price-spell is a duration during which the nominal price of a particular item remains unchanged. For some items, such as gasoline or tomatoes, prices are observed to vary frequently resulting in many short price spells. For other items, such as the cost of a bottle of champagne or the cost of a meal in a restaurant, the price might remain fixed for an extended period of time (many months or even years). One of the richest sources of information about this is the price-quote data used to construct the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The statistical agencies in many countries collect tens of thousands of price-quotes for specific items each month in order to construct the CPI index. In the early years of the 21st century, there were several major studies of nominal price rigidity in the US and Europe using the CPI price quote microdata. The following table gives nominal rigidity as reflected in the frequency of prices changing on average per month in several countries. For example, in France and the UK, each month on average, 19% of prices change (81% are unchanged), which implies that an average price spell lasts about 5.3 months (the expected duration of a price spell is equal to the reciprocal of the frequency of price change if we interpret the empirical frequency as representing the Bernoulli probability of price change generating a negative binomial distribution of durations of price-spells).

...
Wikipedia