Scanner Data and Price Indexes.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the nation's primary measure of the price change in consumer goods and services. To produce the CPI, BLS staff observe prices in stores and other retail outlets, thus tracking the prices of samples of items in the various categories of consumer spending. In some of those categories, all or virtually all of the items have a manufacturer-supplied identifier, known as a Universal Product Code (UPC). Manufacturers print UPCs on their products in bar code format so that computer scanners can read them easily. Retailers assign prices by UPC for scanning at the checkout and to manage their inventories. Consequently, the retailers have computerized records of the prices and number of units they sell; these records are commonly called scanner data. Richardson explores the ways that the BLS can use scanner data in place of price data to calculate the CPI. Specifically, his paper is a progress report on a major CPI program initiative to construct scanner-based test indexes for breakfast cereal in the New York metropolitan area.

The monthly Retail Price Index is the main domestic measure of consumer inflation in the United Kingdom and is one of the highest profile outputs produced by the Office for National Statistics. The quality of the index depends significantly on how representative is the sample of retail outlets used to monitor prices and the choice of items for which prices are collected. Fenwick and Ball look at the scope for enhancing the quality of the index by using scanner data as a benchmark for checking the representative nature of the achieved sample. They then consider, in the context of traditional data collection methods, possible actions to improve the index by exploiting of information available from scanner data.

Lowe and Ruscher compare two different approaches -- the current practice at Statistics Canada and variants using scanner data -- for calculating price indexes for televisions. The authors examine the process of evaluating quality change for televisions over the past nine years and identify the main issues for improvement. They also look at the results based on using scanner data from 1997-9. None of the ways of handling the data seems entirely satisfactory to the authors without additional detailed examination of the micro data. Thus, they conclude that a practical use of scanner data will involve using only part of it.

Chevalier, Kashyap, and Rossi examine the retail and wholesale prices...