The use of the Bennet indicators and their transitive versions for scanner data analysis

Although modern price index theory is based on comparisons of ratios of prices, quantities and expenditures, we may be more interested in the magnitude of differences in these characteristics in many business applications. The benefit of using these differences is that there is no problem associated with the occurrence of zero prices and quantities, a problem that arises when we work with ratios. In practice, we most often care about decomposing value difference into indicators of contributions from price and quantity differences. The best-known price and quantity indicators are the Bennet indicators, which are not transitive. Although there have been papers in the literature that propose a transitive version of the Bennet indicators, they deal with comparisons across firms in cross-section or panel contexts. This paper revises the price and quantity Bennet indicators and their multilateral versions for the analysis of scanner data. Specifically, i nstead o f c onsidering c omparisons across firms, c ountries or r egions, the t ransitive versions of t he Bennet i ndicators a re a dapted to work on scanner data sets observed over a fixed time w indow. Since the scanner data sets have a high turnover of products, which can make it difficult to interpret the difference in sales values over the compared time periods, the paper also considers a matched sample approach. One of the objectives of the study is to compare bilateral and multilateral Bennet indicator results across all available products or strictly matched products over time. It also examines the impact of data filters used and the level of data aggregation on the price and quantity Bennet indicators. According to the best author’s knowledge, this study is a pioneer in the field of implementing the multilateral Bennet indicators in scanner data analysis.