201–210 of 252 posts
‘’’ 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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada
And that's just what could be proven in court.
Here is an app idea: Users use a smartphone app to zap the price labels on shelves in shops. The app can provide basic price history and comparison prices etc. Furthermore, users could organise into little community groups. The app is tracking what is a good price and what is a good shelf life etc and what is in demand and what is on specific members shopping lists etc and tells the zapper how many to buy for a commo…
Monetization? I explored that idea before, but soon discovered it's hard to charge customers already looking to save money. Yet unfortunately, what's easier and more lucrative is selling that same data to the retailers to keep your lights on.
Or, with big VC backing, in some markets you could set up a mail-out retailer that is just undercutting shelf prices. You have the data on who is buying what and how much they are paying, and you are providing the organisational glue for community group buying and stockrooms, so you could be getting into being a virtual supermarket without renting any retail space?
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Interesting history! For the record, it's not like telecoms aren't an oligopoly in the USA, with the attendant "crazy shitty" customer service.
Yeah I honestly can't imagine how the customer experience could possibly be much worse than what we've got in the US but their speeds are generally lower and costs significantly higher. When I visited Toronto years ago I had a consistently better data connection than my friend who lived there, and paid less for the international roaming to use it than he paid for his regular domestic data plan.
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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…
Canadian economics departments are full of really smart economists. They are happy to help. 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 bu…
2. Collusion is a strong word. It hints at breaking the law, willfull action, etc. Looking at the price of a competitor and acting upon that, and internal information, is not collusion. It is completely legal and economically rational behaviour. There are hints and information everywhere on which to act. Groceries are an oligopoly, and they are ogipolistic buyers as well. Lots of information for grocers in the price bids of their suppliers, that all groceries get in tandem.
3. I've worked as an economist at one of those government agencies. They are filled with keen PhD / MSc economists looking to bust kartels and find collusion. Geographical price dispersion models are so '00s. There is a lot of positive energy and interaction between academia and government. Actually _proving_ collusion is terribly hard. Prices that move in parallel is not collusion. Proving collusion is finding documents, emails, phone calls, tracking cars with staff members of various firms to motels , paper trails of inside information in another firm. That's collusion. And I fear that's not what happens in the grocery sector.
The motel one comes to mind as real life example of how DoJ in the US prosecuted a proper cartel. The talk was by more a broad-shouldered officer type, than an economist. Certain set of transport firms always had a interesting way of responding to auctions. Always the second best offer was quite far behind and there was a pattern to which firms did or did not reply to a bid request. End of the investigation, they could trace employees of the firms to meeting in a motel before bidding. And somebody left a paper trail.
Never forget that these !@#$* price fixed bread for years, and got away by offering a $25 gift card. No one went to jail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada And that's just what could be proven in court.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-bread-price-fixing-1...
The government hasn't taken anyone to court yet, but justice and progress is possible. We will get there by continuing to talk about this and asking fellow Canadians to reflect on the state of our society.
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We know they have been colluding, the question is on what other kinds of goods? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada
Thanks for the context. I'm still not certain that an instance of collusion on the price of bread in 2015 implies wider collusion in 2024. Ideally, the data would be proving this, but I guess my skepticism is the cost of making a claim before the research is done.
It is usually the local, raw materials where collusion is strongest.