PPP and Corporate Pricing Strategy

The law of one price assumes the exchange rate will move over time so that the price of the same good is the same everywhere. However, corporations do not necessarily follow this as they may vary national prices of the same good to reflect a variety of factors in those countries such as local supply/demand dynamics, delivery costs, cultural tastes, customer price tolerance, target margin, competitor prices, market share considerations and so forth. To an economist, such price variations represent temporary distortions, which should over time be eliminated by market efficiency. To a corporate executive, faced with the frequently competing real-world priorities of profit maximization and raising market share, there may be nothing temporary about such “distortions”. As a result, PPP may in some cases not hold over the “short term” for homogeneous goods since such pricing strategies may not allow it to hold.