On sample survey designs for consumer price indexes - ARCHIVED

Survey sampling to estimate a Consumer Price Index (CPI) is quite complicated, generally requiring a combination of data from at least two surveys: one giving prices, one giving expenditure weights. Fundamentally different approaches to the sampling process - probability sampling and purposive sampling - have each been strongly advocated and are used by different countries in the collection of price data. By constructing a small "world" of purchases and prices from scanner data on cereal and then simulating various sampling and estimation techniques, we compare the results of two design and estimation approaches: the probability approach of the United States and the purposive approach of the United Kingdom. For the same amount of information collected, but given the use of different estimators, the United Kingdom's methods appear to offer better overall accuracy in targeting a population superlative consumer price index.