administered price

administered price, price determined by an individual producer or seller and not purely by market forces. Administered prices are common in industries with few competitors and those in which costs tend to be rigid and more or less uniform. They are considered undesirable when they cause prices to be higher than a competitive standard, when they are accompanied by excessive non-price competition (efforts to increase sales without enhancing the value of the product), or when they add to inflationary tendencies—either by failure to lower prices in response to cost reductions or by increasing prices to maintain a given margin of profit in the face of rising costs.

The stability of administered prices is counted by some observers as an advantage in its provision of a basis for planning. Some consumers have been found to prefer predetermined prices as facilitating budgeting in advance. Claims have also been made that administered prices are necessary to the operation of a mass production to avoid the inefficiency in negotiating prices in each transaction. A more accurate statement might be that the undesirable effects are not inherent in administered prices but in the nature of the competition that accompanies them.