Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by nosecreek » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 2:08 PM UTC

willvarfar wrote: post #198

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…

I’ve got a site with the price history aspect for Canadian groceries (http://grocerytracker.ca/), but the community groups/public lists idea is interesting. I definitely feel like there is a lot of potential in this space.

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

#222

Post by mistermann » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 2:10 PM UTC

99_00 wrote: post #22

1. Online prices are not the same as in store prices 2. No one, other than random people in messages forums, is alleging collusion or price fixing. No one at any university, not the government, not the media. 3. The government’s investigation, which many of the conspiracy theorists site as evidence, shows a lack of competition led to 1 or 2 % increase in price over 12 years, and the vast majority of the price increas…

> No one, other than random people in messages forums, is alleging collusion or price fixing. No one at any university, not the government, not the media.

It isn't possible for you to know this.

> many of the conspiracy theorists

1. People who live in glass houses should not throw stones, or so they say anyways.

2. "Many"? What percentage of the "conspiracy theorists" "are" as you describe?

> and the vast majority of the price increases was due to things like war in Ukraine, Covid restrictions, fuel prices due to energy crisis

I'd like to see if the government investigators used language as loosely as you do.

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

#223

Post by nosecreek » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 2:11 PM UTC

juujian wrote: post #2

I'm sure there is a theory of how this would reduce prices - what is it? Real estate markets became infinitely more transparent over the last couple of years, to the extent that the data is used to train data scientist. The result? Speculators entered the market at it's messed up.

I’d be curious to hear more from OP on this as well. I’ve got my own price tracking site for Canadian groceries (http://grocerytracker.ca/) but my primary goal has been to get information in the hands of average Canadians so they can make informed buying decisions.

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

#224

Post by mistermann » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 2:19 PM UTC

wjnc wrote: post #220

mistermann wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 underw…

If we were actually serious here, we could introduce a variety of ideas into this conversation that would provide very interesting insight into what is going on in this thread, and in the realms surrounding these allegations...just one of them is this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption

It would be fun if this fellow's initiative actually got some traction, and attention, and then out of the blue they launched a new educational section of their website to assist the public (and journalists...or not) in their thinking on such matters.

I suspect these giant retailers have a risk department, and at least some people in that department would be able to recognize that which the general public and participants in this thread lack the ability to recognize.

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

#225

Post by hluska » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 2:25 PM UTC

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…

Can you put a link to the story about the Stats Canada manager? There was a story a few years ago about a Stats Canada employee who could not reproduce a model because of confidentiality reasons within CRA, but certainly you wouldn’t be getting confidentiality and privacy mixed up with competence. Can you put up a link?

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

#226

Post by bogwog » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 2:26 PM UTC

delichon wrote: post #108

Say I set my apple prices at 0.5 standard deviations below the average prices I can find in the vicinity. Is that an attempt to undercut the market or collude with it? If I set the price to the average, is that collusion or just trying to maximize my profit on apples? If I set it higher than average, is that collusion, or me telling the market that I think I have premium apples? How do you get from correlation to col…

> This project seems to build on an assumption that it is collusive to set prices based on other market prices, or else how could it be a hammer to bash collusion?

Did you read that on the website, or are you making that assumption?

This is just a dataset, and on its own isn't going to reveal something like collusion. But if you are researching collusion, you can use this data to help you understand behaviors of businesses.

Also, collusion doesn't necessarily have to involve prices.

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

#227

Post by hluska » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 2:31 PM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #176

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…

Is it necessary to prove it? I think it's sufficient to come up with an unbiased metric for which players are the most likely to be colluding at any given time. That would be a starting point for encouraging them to behave such that they're obviously not colluding: compete louder please, or you'll be at the top of this list.

The problem is that you can only analyze pricing at the retail level. At the retail level, prices can legally be set in any number of ways. For example, it is totally legal to walk into a competitor’s store and set your prices accordingly.

That’s all this metric will show.

It also won’t show supply chain issues that make the Canadian grocery industry look the way it does. As an example, buy 100 head of cattle in western Canada and get the beef into a store. Are you having any luck finding a place to process it?

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

#228

Post by hluska » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #187

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well… what do you want to happen ? You can publish some correlations between prices. (Remember there is no known method where you can look at a time series of prices across stores and say “that’s collusion!”). And hey if you have 10,000 - 100,000 products per store you probably have correlations as high as you want. None of that will actually show collusion or more importantly suggest a policy response. Even very hig…

I think there are a lot of people in desperate situations who feel like the deck is stacked against them. They end up lashing out in completely irrational, often violent ways. You see them on the news all the time. What I want to happen is for those people to realize that they're not alone, and that the whole world is not working to put them at a disadvantage. Really, it's a rather small group of people who are setti…

Yes, I’m sure that welding the doors shut on opening day will really stick it to the man. It certainly won’t horrify the minimum wage employees who go in there to work.

What an unbelievably stupid thing to advocate for, much less under the guise of non violence.

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

#229

Post by mthoms » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 2:54 PM UTC

motohagiography wrote: post #50

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…

Your analysis of food price increases "in the last few years" doesn't mention the worst financial crises the country has faced in (at least) 80 years and the effect it had on inflation. It also doesn't mention the record corporate profits being recorded in several sectors. The profit margin of our largest grocery chain actually increased 50% during Covid for instance.

Instead, your analysis is simply: "Government bad!"

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the government isn't a very large part of the problem (ie for increasing the money supply and a lot of the things you mentioned) but to try and explain what happened to food prices without even mentioning Covid, or record corporate profits, is extremely disingenuous.

But damn those "economically illiterate" serfs complaining about high prices, eh?

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

#230

Post by hollerith » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 2:57 PM UTC

mthoms wrote: post #229

motohagiography wrote: post #50

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…

Your analysis of food price increases "in the last few years" doesn't mention the worst financial crises the country has faced in (at least) 80 years and the effect it had on inflation. It also doesn't mention the record corporate profits being recorded in several sectors. The profit margin of our largest grocery chain actually increased 50% during Covid for instance. Instead, your analysis is simply: "Government bad…

>The profit margin of our largest grocery chain actually increased 50%

That's not exactly a strong indictment: when the average margin for the industry is about 1%, all kinds of things are going to cause this or that industry participant's margin to fluctuate up or down by a factor of 50%, i.e., to go down to 0.5% or up to 2%.

It's not the same thing as Apple's margins, which last time I checked 12 years ago or so hovered around 33%, so if they went up by 50% (i.e., to 50%) it would mean something (at least if they stayed at that high for many years, which BTW you have not mentioned whether the largest grocery chain's did).