This paper reviews the theory of the true cost of living index and its approximation through superlative index numbers, as well as the Vartia quantum theory of bias in index numbers as applied to substitution bias in consumer price indices. Estimated adjustments are proposed for the Argentine...

We study how within-store price variation changes with inflation, and whether households exploit it to attenuate the inflation burden. We use micro price data for food products sold by 91 large multi-channel retailers in ten countries between 2018 and 2024. Measuring unit prices within narrowly...

The Boskin report (1996) concluded that the US consumer price index (CPI) overestimated the inflation by 1.1 percentage points. This was due to several measurement errors in the CPI. One of them is called quality change bias. We compare two methods in this paper which can be used to correct for...

Since the British government started using the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) for some uprating purposes in 2011, there has been a proliferation of consumer price indices in the UK – nine at the last count with some claim to apply to the population at large. Leaving to one side their possible use...

The COVID-19 Pandemic has led to changes in expenditure patterns that can introduce significant bias in the measurement of Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation. I use publicly-available data on credit and debit card transactions to update the official CPI weights and re-calculate inflation with...

Prices collection for consumer price indices (CPI) compilation has come a long way in the past 20 years. While ideally, the index should include expenditure made by all households, urban and rural, throughout the country, usually CPIs in various countries had limited geographic coverage both for...

Aim/purpose - Web-scraping is a technique used to automatically extract data from websites. After the rise-up of online shopping, it allows the acquisition of information about prices of goods sold by retailers such as supermarkets or internet shops. This study examines the possibility of using...

In this paper, we investigate the relation between business profit and the demand price-elasticity of consumers. Business profit increases with a decrease in customer price-sensitivity only when the relation between a firm's net operating margin (after fixed-costs) and its price-cost margin...

We characterize the dispersion of grocery prices in France based on a large original data set of prices in more than 1500 supermarkets. On average across products, the 90th percentile of relative prices is 17 percentage points higher than the 10th and the mean absolute deviation from quarterly...