Price Discounts and Cheapflation During the Post-Pandemic Inflation Surge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study how within-store price variation changes with inflation, and whether households exploit it to attenuate the inflation burden.We use micro price data for food products sold by 91 large multi-channel retailers in ten countries between 2018 and 2024.Measuring unit prices within narrowly defined product categories, we analyze two key sources of variation in prices within a store: temporary price discounts and differences across similar products.Price changes associated with discounts grew at a much lower average rate than regular prices, helping to mitigate the inflation burden.By contrast, cheapflation-a faster rise in prices of cheaper goods relative to prices of more expensive varieties of the same good-exacerbated it.Using Canadian Homescan Panel Data, we estimate that spending on discounts reduced the change in the average unit price by 4.1 percentage points, but expenditure switching to cheaper brands raised it by 2.8 percentage points.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".