Father's Day was on 10 May, and many will seize the opportunity to go on an outing, with a well-filled handcart, and enjoy the day. But you should think twice about using other vehicles. We have noticed for some years now that particularly high numbers of road traffic accidents under the influence of alcohol occur on specific days. It comes as no surprise that this includes Father's Day and 1 May – but it is nevertheless remarkable that our traffic accidents calendar shows such a clear pattern.
On Father's Day 2016, for instance, 291 alcohol-related accidents occurred – more than on both New Year's Day (271) and 1 May (224), and roughly three times as many as on a normal day. In recent years, the highest number of alcohol-related accidents on a Father's Day was recorded in 2008, when Father's Day coincided with Labour Day. The police registered 420 accidents under the influence of alcohol on that day.
Our traffic accidents calendar visualises the development of traffic accidents from 2006 onwards. It enables you to compare alcohol-related accidents, motorcycle accidents and accidents involving personal injury over the year.
Frequent online shoppers will notice that the prices of some products change within short time intervals. This type of price-setting behaviour is referred to as dynamic pricing. Roughly 10,000 online prices are collected for consumer price statistics each month. Is it still possible for consumer price statistics to capture the representative price development and to take into account dynamic pricing?
In their article on Dynamic pricing as a challenge for consumer price statistics, published in the 2/2018 issue of our WISTA scientific journal, Christian Blaudow and Florian Burg report on the results of a study conducted in 2017 to examine the price-setting behaviour of online shops. Using web scraping, a technique for the automated collection of online prices, the study monitored products included in the consumer price index sample. It was found that web scraping is a sensible and efficient method to expand online price collection in future and to help ensure the quality of consumer price statistics.
