The Billion Prices Project (BPP) was an academic initiative at MIT Sloan and

Harvard Business School Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate school, graduate business school of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university. Located in Allston, Massachusetts, HBS owns Harvard Business Publishing, which p ...

that uses prices collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct research in macro and

international economics International economics is concerned with the effects upon economic activity from international differences in productive resources and consumer preferences and the international institutions that affect them. It seeks to explain the patterns an ...

and compute real-time

inflation In economics, inflation is an increase in the average price of goods and services in terms of money. This increase is measured using a price index, typically a consumer price index (CPI). When the general price level rises, each unit of curre ...

metrics. It was started in 2008 by professors Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon.

History

In 2007, the BPP initiated Inflación Verdadera, a project that provided a daily inflation gauge for Argentina, serving as an alternative to the official

consumer price index A consumer price index (CPI) is a statistical estimate of the level of prices of goods and services bought for consumption purposes by households. It is calculated as the weighted average price of a market basket of Goods, consumer goods and ...

which was manipulated by the government during 2007-2016. Within the same framework, in May 2017 the BPP began experimenting with crowd-sourcing and mobile technologies to measure the monthly inflation rate in Venezuela where official statistics haven’t been published since 2015. Recent research projects include, for example, the study of how offline pricing behavior is being affected by the web, mobile browsing and price-checking technologies. Other recent research makes use of online prices to construct quarterly purchasing power parities that could provide real-time estimates of real consumption across countries without the need for consumer price index extrapolations across both developing and developed countries. The BPP monitored daily price fluctuations of ~15 million items sold by +1000 online retailers in more than 70 countries.

Awards

In 2018, the BPP won the "Economics in Central Banking Award"

References

External links

*{{Official website, http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/ 2008 establishments in Massachusetts Projects established in 2008 Inflation in the United States Harvard Business School