151–160 of 252 posts
Love this project. I just moved from Toronto, and compared to the US was frustrated by how every major industry in Canada was basically an oligopoly. In Canada if you look at telecoms, banks, insurance, grocers, airlines, etc – there are a few major competitors and that's about it. It's very difficult to start a competitor, often for regulatory reasons, and most smaller competitors end up getting bought out by the bi…
Love this project. I just moved from Toronto, and compared to the US was frustrated by how every major industry in Canada was basically an oligopoly. In Canada if you look at telecoms, banks, insurance, grocers, airlines, etc – there are a few major competitors and that's about it. It's very difficult to start a competitor, often for regulatory reasons, and most smaller competitors end up getting bought out by the bi…
Interesting history! For the record, it's not like telecoms aren't an oligopoly in the USA, with the attendant "crazy shitty" customer service.
canada's attitude toward competition is different than that of the US though. our agricultural products (dairy, wheat, maple syrup, and to a lesser extent retail beer and alcohols) are controlled by state monopolies who set prices. the reason food is so expensive is because of fuel costs from the last few years, which were further not-helped by both an increase in federal taxes on fuel and the semi-official policy of…
‘’’ Reach out to me (email “jacob” at this website) if: You can do economic analysis of pricing data, and especially the interaction/correlation of multiple streams of prices across time ‘’’ The item in that quote is significantly, significantly harder than the author is giving it credit for. Canada has a competition policy agency. They are (almost surely) entitled to demand data from firms as part of an investigatio…
Conversely, I think you're overestimating the technical capailities of Canadian federal or provincial regulatory organizations. Government departments notoriously have serious technical debt, so while they might entitled to demand this kind of data, I sincerely doubt they are doing it with anything resembling modern data analysis. These orgs aren't going to have working data lakes, spark clusters or data warehouses o…
The issue here has nothing to do with the size of the data. A grocery store will have 100,000 products at most, probably sets prices about weekly and maybe you have ten years of data. The market is an oligopoly so you have 10-15 store chains. That fits in memory.
The issue is not at all the mechanics of running the analysis but what analysis you run. Or don’t run bc as I said there is no easy way to just “identify collusion” in data like this or every agency would already be doing it
Love this project. I just moved from Toronto, and compared to the US was frustrated by how every major industry in Canada was basically an oligopoly. In Canada if you look at telecoms, banks, insurance, grocers, airlines, etc – there are a few major competitors and that's about it. It's very difficult to start a competitor, often for regulatory reasons, and most smaller competitors end up getting bought out by the bi…
There is only one way to bring true competition to the Canadian market and that is to let American Companies compete instead of barring them from Canadian markets.
If you recall during NAFTA 2, Trudeau went to great efforts to allow Rogers, Bell and Telus to be re-classified as Canadian Media Companies to protect them from the American businesses. Canadians cheered higher prices and protectionism because fuck America and fuck Trump, but in the end cut off their nose to spite their face.
Canadians deserve their high prices and lack of competition and a market that is not consumer friendly, they made that loud and clear in their support of the Liberals during NAFTA2 Negotiations.
Glad I left a long time ago....
ExPat
It's not the grocery stores creating this environment, it's their suppliers that have been consolidating non stop for 10 years. This is the real story: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/...
TBF in Canada grocery stores are also suppliers; about a quarter of sales are of private label items.
‘’’ Reach out to me (email “jacob” at this website) if: You can do economic analysis of pricing data, and especially the interaction/correlation of multiple streams of prices across time ‘’’ The item in that quote is significantly, significantly harder than the author is giving it credit for. Canada has a competition policy agency. They are (almost surely) entitled to demand data from firms as part of an investigatio…
isnt the difference that when you have an open dataset, you get many many more eyeballs, and some very passionate ones. and they can make it their hobby, unconstrained by day to day needs of a job. eh?
Also imagine the false discovery rate of with the thousands of products which exist in a grocery store!
“Ah look we found collusion in salty snacks between weeks 38 and 45 of 2022 in stores 1, 5 and 13!”
Even if you knew what analysis to do (and you don’t) you are going to end up crying wolf a million times and solving no problem at all.
Again - a worthy effort but the methods just don’t exist.
‘’’ Reach out to me (email “jacob” at this website) if: You can do economic analysis of pricing data, and especially the interaction/correlation of multiple streams of prices across time ‘’’ The item in that quote is significantly, significantly harder than the author is giving it credit for. Canada has a competition policy agency. They are (almost surely) entitled to demand data from firms as part of an investigatio…
Hey man, I'm just creating the hammer - you can throw it in the lake, make a treehouse for your kid, smash a window, up to you :-D
This paper:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20170116
Is the best case scenario (=easiest) for the exercise you want to do and will illustrate what is hard about the grocery case. In the paper there is:
- One product
- one clearly isolated market.
- four or five firms.
- A clear mechanism for collusion (a government price sharing website).
Even then there is no statistical or econometric test out of the box which “shows collusion”. It’s a great paper (both in my opinion and that’s why it got into AER) but there is nothing they do that says “hey here’s collusion based on this t-stat.”
The grocery case (overlapping markets, thousands of products, many firms) is vastly, vastly harder.
Isn’t the root of the problem Canadian protectionism? By law, it’s near impossible to have new (foreign) competitors in the Canadian market. Same for industries like telecom.
I believe one of the key issues is anaemic anti-monopoly laws and enforcement. The grocery sector in Canada is very healthy and innovative, even without foreign entrants. It's just that any successful small chains get eaten up by the giants - "Adonis" got bought by Metro, "Farm Boy" got bought by Sobeys and "T&T" got bought by Loblaws. Any new threat gets eaten up by the big players.