A minimum advertised price (MAP) policy is a popular vertical restraint. We study retail pricing under MAP using price data of Seagate hard disk drives on US online retailers. The data suggest that MAP is not a form of minimum resale price maintenance (RPM). First, we find that retail prices are often lower than MAP. Second, retail prices of products subject to MAP have greater dispersions between retailers. Lastly, some retail prices can increase after a MAP decrease. These observations are consistent with the predictions of a search model that interprets MAP as a form of information restraint.
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Asmat et al. (2026) studied this question.
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