Scraped Data and Sticky Prices

Alberto  Cavallo

Article | Review of Economics and Statistics | March 2018

Scraped Data and Sticky Prices

Abstract

I use daily prices collected from online retailers in five countries to study the impact of measurement bias on three common price stickiness statistics. Relative to previous results, I find that online prices have longer durations, with fewer price changes close to zero, and hazard functions that initially increase over time. I show that time-averaging and imputed prices in scanner and CPI data can fully explain the differences with the literature. I then report summary statistics for the duration and size of price changes using scraped data collected from 181 retailers in 31 countries.

Keywords: online data; scraped data; sticky prices; scanner data; consumer price index; Price; Data and Data Sets;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Cavallo, Alberto. "Scraped Data and Sticky Prices." Review of Economics and Statistics 100, no. 1 (March 2018): 105–119.

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Scraped Data and Sticky Prices

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