Current WISTA edition: Dynamic pricing on the internet

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.