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Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

jacobfilipp.com

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Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#211

Post by mercurialuser »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #86
Reason077 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supermarkets often publish upcoming sale prices in advance, and matching your competitor’s prices is not collusion. On the contrary, it’s a sign of healthy competition! If supermarkets are getting together and forming handshake agreements like “we will not change prices between November and February”, like Canadian supermarkets apparently did, then that could constitute collusion.

Lowering prices together makes sense. But why would you raise your prices of a commodity product to match your competitor's? If they are going to raise, you hold and rake in the extra sales.

Your past data shows you sell 100 apples every day, despite the cost. Then it shows that you may sell other 100 if the price is considered "low" by the clients or 30 if the price is "high". Then you know how many are in stocks, from how many days, and how many are arriving. And you fix the price accordingly

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#212

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

oehpr wrote: post #91
dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Blaming an entire countries population specifically, that elects representatives on a first past the post system, strikes me as a bit divorced from reality. Canadians do not live in a direct democracy, they don't explicitly vote on every policy, and they get to have less than a single bit of informational influence on their government every 4 years. There's blame to go around, for sure. But pegging it entirely on the…

>There's blame to go around, for sure.

Who is to blame? (not a rhetorical question)

Blaming politicians/system get really old, doesn't it?

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#213

Post by sofixa »

a13n wrote: post #84

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…

> 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 big guys.

> As a result, they have crazy shitty experiences. Telecoms are frustratingly expensive for cable and mobile services. Banks are dreadful and charge fees left and right, for basic things that are free in the US. Customer support with any of these companies is terrible.

This is funny to me from across the pond, because that's how I'd describe the US as well.

Small amount of telecoms and banks that charge exorbitant fees sounds like the US too.

High barrier to entry for physical infrastructure and banking are the reality all around the world, and for good reasons. There's more to it than that.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#214

Post by mistermann »

wjnc wrote: post #205
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1. If anything, this public dataset will increase 'collusion' by giving the parties in the market access to the integral set of market prices. 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…

> 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.

There is the skillset of the employees, and then there is what management allows employees to work on. A decade or so ago, a Statistics Canada senior manager was interviewed and claimed as fact that they were unable to reproduce an Excel model that analyzed the % of real estate sales to recent immigrants to Canada, one that an individual CRA team (one person I suspect, it's not complicated) in Richmond BC had done a few years before.

At the same time, they were given additional budget of many millions of dollars to accomplish this task and other things. They did not accomplish the task.

> Proving collusion...

The government has tipped their hand already as far as I'm concerned. I don't expect anything would ever be proven, I just want to see as much evidence as possible to help me decide what I am going to believe - I'm certainly not going to take epistemic advice from anyone in the Canadian government.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#215

Post by mistermann »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #157
the_cat_kittles wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. They have to know what they are doing. 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 metho…

> 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.

Mocking the epistemic skills of others while engaging in literal soothsaying (stating facts about future events) shows how culturally conditioned North Americans have become regarding government wrong doing.

I don't expect these people to be successful in their primary goal, but an enticing second order effect is it could accidentally catalyze public interest in epistemology, logic, rhetoric, the nature of Human culture and cognition, and a variety of the other things that keep commoners locked in a sophisticated virtual reality without their awareness (in any sophisticated manner at least). Now that would make this whole game a lot more interesting, because it applies to everything.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#216

Post by lupusreal »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #154
surgicalcolor wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The market is an oligopoly so you have 10-15 store chains.

Not that prices aren't consistent across a chain, individual stores in one chain will have different prices, calibrated to local supply and demand. In many cases they'll also have local products that aren't in most of the stores in that chain. I think you have to track prices in each and every store, not just per chain.

Still, I think you're right about this fitting in memory. This isn't "big data".

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#217

Post by jjkaczor »

jfil wrote: post #94
IncreasePosts wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to mention that your browser almost certainly sends an Accept-Encoding: gzip header, but it appears the server doesn't care to sent a Content-Encoding: gzip back!

I am the author - I appreciate your comment & the parent comment. I'll make the sqlite file more manageable shortly (wasn't expecting the project to get this much attention so its taking a while to catch up with everything!)

Thanks for creating this - I have cross-posted a link to your site/project on Reddit to "/r/loblawsisoutofcontrol"

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#218

Post by mistermann »

adamomada wrote: post #95

There was a website a few years back that posted the prices of Brewers Retail (aka The Beer Store, single buyer of beer in Ontario) in a nicer, spreadsheet like format where you could sort by total price, price per mL, price per case size, etc etc (can’t recall the name of it at the moment). It was great. And transparent, and just data. And were shut down by a threat of a lawsuit. Apparently you can’t do that in Cana…

> And were shut down by a threat of a lawsuit.

As is the will of people, since Canada is a democracy, and that's what democracies do. Not like those terrible communist governments. Everyone should well know what they do (and how your friendly local neighborhood democracy is so much better, you see), you can read about it in your newspaper quite literally every single day for the last several years/decades.

Threads like these are diamonds in the rough, I love collecting them.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#219

Post by ActionHank »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #92

‘’’ 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…

They're still trying to resolve the bread price fixing from years before the pandemic.

The agency is likely underfunded, understaffed, and disincentivized from actually fixing the issues which are so pervasive across the country that it's just business as usual for most people..

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#220

Post by wjnc »

mistermann wrote: post #214
wjnc wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. If anything, this public dataset will increase 'collusion' by giving the parties in the market access to the integral set of market prices. 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…

> 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. There is the skillset of the employees, and then there is what management allows employees to work on. A decade or so ago, a Statistics Canada senior manager was interviewed and claimed as fact that they were unable to reproduce an Excel model that analyzed the…

Totally get your point between individual skill / trust and the agency level. In my little country we had a recent event where a governement agency, pretty much failing for the last 20 years, but especially pronounced the last 5 years suddenly came clear in a PR-move. What? Turns out a newspaper had succeeded in a neatly tuned FOIA-request (local equivalent) and forced their hand. At the same moment a vote was underway for extra budget, looking to fail. So the sudden transparency was really pretty ugly.

Surrounding collusion. I can’t tell you what to believe, but keep in mind that there are a lot of reasons why correlated moves in prices can occur without communication. Lots literature in industrial organization (the field of why markets have particular ordening and how actors behave on markets) on signaling. A though experiment might be the games of poker versus bridge on explicit vs implicit signaling / coordination.

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