IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/14433.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Timing and Quantity of Consumer Purchases and the Consumer Price Index

Author

Listed:
  • Rachel Griffith
  • Ephraim Leibtag
  • Andrew Leicester
  • Aviv Nevo

Abstract

A common approach to measuring price changes is to look at the change of the expenditure needed to purchase a fixed basket of goods. It is well-known that this approach suffers from problems and creates several biases in the measurement of price changes faced by consumers. Substitution and outlet bias, two commonly studied concerns, are both driven by consumer choices of what and where to buy. However, consumers also make other choices, including how much and when to buy. We discuss the implications of consumers' timing and quantity decisions have on standard practices of computing of computing a price index. We use household-level data on quantities purchased and prices paid to construct a measure of the savings made by consumers' optimizing behaviour in the purchase of food. In particular, we compare the prices actually paid by the consumers to various alternatives that do not allow for substitution. Our analysis suggests that the average consumer makes significant, and comparable in magnitude, savings from the four dimensions of choice that we study. Furthermore, our data suggests significant heterogeneity in consumer behavior, and that this behavior is correlated with demographics. Our findings suggest that ignoring timing and quantity decisions, when computing a price index, can generate biases on the order of magnitude of substitution and outlet biases.

Suggested Citation

  • Rachel Griffith & Ephraim Leibtag & Andrew Leicester & Aviv Nevo, 2008. "Timing and Quantity of Consumer Purchases and the Consumer Price Index," NBER Working Papers 14433, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14433
    Note: IO ME PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w14433.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Christine Boizot & Jean-Marc Robin & Michael Visser, 2001. "The demand for food products," Post-Print hal-03416605, HAL.
    2. Boizot, Christine & Robin, Jean-Marc & Visser, Michael, 2001. "The Demand for Food Products: An Analysis of Interpurchase Times and Purchased Quantities," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 111(470), pages 391-419, April.
    3. Baye, Michael R, 1985. "Price Dispersion and Functional Price Indices," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 53(1), pages 213-223, January.
    4. Michael J. Boskin, 1998. "Consumer Prices, the Consumer Price Index, and the Cost of Living," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 12(1), pages 3-26, Winter.
    5. Christine Boizot & Jean-Marc Robin & Michael Visser, 2001. "The demand for food products," Post-Print hal-03416604, HAL.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Smith, Howard & Thomassen, Øyvind, 2012. "Multi-category demand and supermarket pricing," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 30(3), pages 309-314.
    2. Glandon, PJ, 2018. "Sales and the (Mis)measurement of price level fluctuations," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 60-77.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rachel Griffith & Ephraim Leibtag & Andrew Leicester & Aviv Nevo, 2009. "Consumer Shopping Behavior: How Much Do Consumers Save?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 23(2), pages 99-120, Spring.
    2. Jakina Debnam, 2017. "Selection Effects and Heterogeneous Demand Responses to the Berkeley Soda Tax Vote," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 99(5), pages 1172-1187.
    3. Baker, Scott R. & Johnson, Stephanie & Kueng, Lorenz, 2024. "Financial returns to household inventory management," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).
    4. Donna, Javier & Espin-Sanchez, Jose, 2014. "The Illiquidity of Water Markets," MPRA Paper 55078, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Donna, Javier D., 2018. "Measuring Long-Run Price Elasticities in Urban Travel Demand," MPRA Paper 90059, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Igal Hendel & Aviv Nevo, 2006. "Measuring the Implications of Sales and Consumer Inventory Behavior," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 74(6), pages 1637-1673, November.
    7. P. Février & L. Wilner, 2012. "Do Consumers Correctly Expect Price Reductions? Testing Dynamic Behavior," Documents de Travail de l'Insee - INSEE Working Papers g2012-03, Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques.
    8. Kazuko Kano, 2018. "Consumer Inventory and Demand for Storable Goods: New Evidence from a Consumer Survey," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 69(3), pages 284-305, September.
    9. Kozo Ueda & Kota Watanabe & Tsutomu Watanabe, 2020. "Consumer Inventory and the Cost of Living Index: Theory and Some Evidence from Japan," Working Papers on Central Bank Communication 025, University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Economics.
    10. Diansheng Dong & Harry Kaiser, 2008. "Studying household purchasing and nonpurchasing behaviour for a frequently consumed commodity: two models," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(15), pages 1941-1951.
    11. Aguirregabiria, Victor & Nevo, Aviv, 2010. "Recent developments in empirical IO: dynamic demand and dynamic games," MPRA Paper 27814, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    12. Crentsil, Christian & Gschwandtner, Adelina & Wahhaj, Zaki, 2020. "The effects of risk and ambiguity aversion on technology adoption: Evidence from aquaculture in Ghana," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 179(C), pages 46-68.
    13. Février, Philippe & Wilner, Lionel, 2016. "Do consumers correctly expect price reductions? Testing dynamic behavior," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 25-40.
    14. Javier D. Donna, 2021. "Measuring long‐run gasoline price elasticities in urban travel demand," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 52(4), pages 945-994, December.
    15. Victor Aguirregabiria, 2023. "Dynamic demand for differentiated products with fixed-effects unobserved heterogeneity," The Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 26(1), pages 1-25.
    16. Thierry Magnac & Pierre Dubois, 2016. "Consumer Demand with Unobserved Stockpiling and Intertemporal Price Discrimination," 2016 Meeting Papers 451, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    17. Bonev, Petyo, 2020. "Nonparametric identification in nonseparable duration models with unobserved heterogeneity," Economics Working Paper Series 2005, University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science.
    18. Kozo Ueda & Kota Watanabe & Tsutomu Watanabe, 2021. "Household Inventory, Temporary Sales, and Price Indices," CARF F-Series CARF-F-520, Center for Advanced Research in Finance, Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo.
    19. Dong, Diansheng & Stewart, Hayden & McLaughlin, Patrick W., 2017. "A New Approach for Modeling Household Food Demand with Panel Data: The Case of Cold Cereals," 2017 Annual Meeting, July 30-August 1, Chicago, Illinois 258195, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    20. Igal Hendel & Aviv Nevo, 2006. "Sales and consumer inventory," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 37(3), pages 543-561, September.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
    • L16 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics; Macroeconomic Industrial Structure

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14433. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.