PriceIndices – a New R Package for Bilateral and Multilateral Price Index Calculations

Jacek Białek

PriceIndices – a New R Package for Bilateral and Multilateral Price Index Calculations

Číslo: 2/2021
Periodikum: Statistika

Klíčová slova: Scanner data, bilateral indices, multilateral indices, elementary indices, chain indices, superlative indices

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Anotace: The methodology of price indices dedicated to scanner data is broad, multifaceted, and still contains many open

problems. The main challenges include choosing the index formula and the time window width in multilateral
methods, as well as determining splicing or other data updating methods. Many NSIs experiment with scanner
data, their processing, classifying, matching, and finally using this type of data for CPI calculations. However,
these activities are limited, which is partly due to the lack of widely available software in this field. On the one
hand, R packages dedicated to price indices are available (e.g. IndexNumR or micEconIndex), on the other
hand, their functionality and the scope of implemented methods are quite limited. The article discusses a new
R package, i.e. PriceIndices, which is used to process scanner data and to calculate bilateral and multilateral price
indices. The assumptions for the construction of the package were such that it would serve both practitioners
and scientists through a multitude of methods and their parameterization. The main purpose of the article
is to present the utility of the package in the field of analyzing the dynamics of scanner prices. All obtained
results are based on the real scanner data set on milk obtained from one retailer chain in Poland and included
in the PriceIndices package.