The Ottawa Group’s Contributions to Consumer Price Index Methodology: Institutional Contexts, Epistemic Shifts, and Quality Adjustment Debates (1994-2024)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The statistical treatment of quality change in Consumer Price Indices (CPIs) has long posed conceptual and operational challenges for national statistical offices. Beyond formal harmonization efforts led by international organizations, the creation of the Ottawa Group in 1994 established an informal expert forum in which statisticians and economists could confront these challenges through a mixture of practical experimentation and theoretical discussion. This article reconstructs the institutional and political conditions that enabled the emergence of the Ottawa Group and examines how this space contributed to the evolution of CPI methodology, particularly the question of quality adjustment, over the period 1994–2024. Drawing on an original database of 488 contributions from the Ottawa Group, we combine qualitative historical reconstruction with bibliometric, co-citation, and thematic analyses to map the epistemic configurations that structured the Ottawa Group debates. The results reveal the coexistence of two enduring methodological orientations, one grounded in index-number theory and the other in pragmatic statistical practice, alongside a progressive consolidation of collaborative networks within the Group. Taken together, these findings show how the Ottawa Group served as both a laboratory for methodological innovation and a site where divergent conceptions of “quality” were negotiated, contributing to the broader history of quantification and international statistical harmonization.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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 it