They were first described by institutional economists Gardiner Means and Adolf A. Berle in their 1932 book The Modern Corporation and Private Property.
As Means argued in 1972, "Basically, the administered-price thesis holds that a large body of industrial prices do not behave in the fashion that classical theory would lead one to expect.
It was first developed in 1934–35 to apply to the cyclical behavior of industrial prices.
Since Means and Berle's pioneering work in the 1930s, numerous empirical surveys have been carried out to understand the role of administered prices in national economies.
[10] A study of 630 Japanese firms from 2000 found 54% of them use mark-up pricing.