Regression Analysis – How to Setup Data for Calculating Price Elasticity in Econometrics

econometricseconomicselasticitylogarithmregression

I am working on a project to try understand Linear Regression a bit deeper (they say experimenting is key and getting lost is part of the process) 🙁

In this project, let's assume I have a watch shop. I want to calculate price elasticity of demand for my watches but how do I setup the data as in my mind there are two options:

  1. I have 100 watch styles and each have their own prices and quantity sold for a period of time, so the first setup looks like:
Watch Styles Price Quantity
Style 1 900 10
Style 2 1500 20
Style 3 1000 30
Style 100 2000 50
  1. Alternatively, I can set my data as a transactional time series (monthly for 2 years worth of data). Now the 'price' variable will be the average unit price of watches sold per month and 'quantity' will be the aggregated monthly figure.
Month Avg Price per Month Quantity
April 2019 1225 110
May 2019 1135 150
June 2019 1575 75
April 2021 2050 15

Which data setup is appropriate to run the regression analysis and why?

$$
ln(Quantity) = c + \beta\ ln(Price) + Error
$$

After reading some marketing research papers, it looks like the setup using (2) is favored for elasticity calculation. So how do we interpret the regression results if we use (1) instead?

Best Answer

I think you should be working out the price elasticity of one style of watch. If you look at multiple styles of watches you wouldn't be using linear regression.

I would set my data up to look something like this (but obviously include more weeks/months/years):

enter image description here

There's more information on this here:

https://www.statworx.com/de/blog/food-for-regression-using-sales-data-to-identify-price-elasticity/