<story><title>Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector</title><url>https://jacobfilipp.com/hammer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>huitzitziltzin</author><text>‘’’
Reach out to me (email “jacob” at this website) if:&lt;p&gt;You can do economic analysis of pricing data, and especially the interaction&amp;#x2F;correlation of multiple streams of prices across time
‘’’&lt;p&gt;The item in that quote is significantly, &lt;i&gt;significantly&lt;/i&gt; harder than the author is giving it credit for.   Canada has a competition policy agency.   They are (almost surely) entitled to demand data from firms as part of an investigation.  Their data will be better than the data here.&lt;p&gt;You can rarely &lt;i&gt;if ever&lt;/i&gt; prove these cases on the basis of data analysis alone.  (Indeed if you could the world’s antitrust agencies would just monitor such data!  And anyone engaging in collusion would attack the monitoring adversarially - not that hard to predict!)&lt;p&gt;In grocery data you will be looking at thousands and &lt;i&gt;thousands&lt;/i&gt; of prices of different goods from different suppliers with different costs who are exposed to different shocks due to variation in the costs of their inputs or god knows what else.&lt;p&gt;Not to be negative bc the idea is nice, but this is a complete waste of time.&lt;p&gt;~ an actual antitrust guy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>surgicalcolor</author><text>Conversely, I think you&amp;#x27;re overestimating the technical capailities of Canadian federal or provincial regulatory organizations.&lt;p&gt;Government departments notoriously have serious technical debt, so while they might entitled to demand this kind of data, I sincerely doubt they are doing it with anything resembling modern data analysis. These orgs aren&amp;#x27;t going to have working data lakes, spark clusters or data warehouses on cloud infrastructure. They maybe have legacy SQL databases being pulled into spreadsheets.&lt;p&gt;So, while their data access might be better theoretically, I doubt they truly are able to even remotely analyze the data effectively. Data science in govt is notoriously poor outside of Statscan or other tech heavy departments.</text></comment>
<story><title>Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector</title><url>https://jacobfilipp.com/hammer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>huitzitziltzin</author><text>‘’’
Reach out to me (email “jacob” at this website) if:&lt;p&gt;You can do economic analysis of pricing data, and especially the interaction&amp;#x2F;correlation of multiple streams of prices across time
‘’’&lt;p&gt;The item in that quote is significantly, &lt;i&gt;significantly&lt;/i&gt; harder than the author is giving it credit for.   Canada has a competition policy agency.   They are (almost surely) entitled to demand data from firms as part of an investigation.  Their data will be better than the data here.&lt;p&gt;You can rarely &lt;i&gt;if ever&lt;/i&gt; prove these cases on the basis of data analysis alone.  (Indeed if you could the world’s antitrust agencies would just monitor such data!  And anyone engaging in collusion would attack the monitoring adversarially - not that hard to predict!)&lt;p&gt;In grocery data you will be looking at thousands and &lt;i&gt;thousands&lt;/i&gt; of prices of different goods from different suppliers with different costs who are exposed to different shocks due to variation in the costs of their inputs or god knows what else.&lt;p&gt;Not to be negative bc the idea is nice, but this is a complete waste of time.&lt;p&gt;~ an actual antitrust guy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jfil</author><text>Hey man, I&amp;#x27;m just creating the hammer - you can throw it in the lake, make a treehouse for your kid, smash a window, up to you :-D</text></comment>