Menu

Denial, Rationalization, and the Administered Price Thesis

By Gyun Cheol Gu


PKES Working Paper 2603

February 2026

This paper analyzes neoclassical reactions to Gardiner Means's administered price thesis during 1980-2000. It shows that his original idea has been continuously denied by mainstream economists. At the same time, it has been transformed through a multiplicity of rationalization processes into one or another bastardized form. However, their attempts to deny and/or rationalize the thesis are unsuccessful as their sanitized versions of Means’s theory turn out to be self-contradictory in the neoclassical framework.

Keywords: Gardiner Means, Price rigidity, Administered price

JEL classification: B21 B50 D43