Application of hedonic methods to analysing price changes of information processing equipment in Poland
Application of hedonic methods to analysing price changes of information processing equipment in Poland

Summary/Abstract: Measuring inflation in the sector of information processing equipment presents a significant challenge, as the quality and performance of devices such as computers and smartphones are being substantially improved over short time spans. The harmonised index of consumer prices (HICP) methodology struggles to consistently account for these quality adjustments, which is reflected in the considerable discrepancies of the estimates across EU countries. The aim of the study presented in this paper is to estimate the price changes of computer equipment using hedonic regression and to compare the results with the calculations provided by Statistics Poland and Eurostat. We web-scraped the data from the Polish price comparison platform Pepper.pl covering the period of 2017-2023. We compiled a dataset of ICT products and used machine learning algorithms - K-Nearest Neighbours and Span Categoriser - to impute missing hardware specifications. Our findings differ from official statistics. While Eurostat reports a 10% decline in prices of audio-visual, photographic, and information processing equipment, our analysis indicates a clear upward trend in prices. Among the computer components examined (RAM, GPU, CPU, and SSDs), some deflation was observed only in the case of RAM modules.

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