So I testified before the Senate’s Economic Committee on the FuelWatch bill. Not surprisingly, virtually all of the questions I got came from the Opposition Senators. Senator Abetz was particularly concerned about the fact that I had co-authored so many papers with Stephen King (who had appeared earlier that day on behalf of the ACCC) and was also the PhD supervisor of one of the ACCC staff who ran the econometrics that proved so influential in getting FuelWatch into policy. He seemed to imply it was some sort of revelation but I guess that has never been a secret. So amusingly, the Senator pointed to a paper, co-authored with Stephen, and cited in my submission to the Committee as more evidence of this. Of course, the paper he picked was one of our series on shopper dockets; something that I argued that the ACCC had neglected to pay much attention to. This seemed to me to be a very odd way of implying I was somehow biased towards the ACCC. The (sometimes) “outrageous” Graeme Samuel is unlikely to see it that way.

Anyhow, my main point was that the data that was used by the ACCC for its study needs to be widely available for other econometricians (not myself) to use. Alas, the ACCC doesn’t have the rights to deliver that data to us and that right rests with Informed Sources who have been very selective in the academics they have given the data to; Sinclair Davidson and Don Harding — both of whom are anti-FuelWatch in their conclusions. I told the Committee that such selective data allocation undermines the independence of these researchers and serves no one’s cause (Something I think they will agree is the case). Put simply, while the industry is keeping the data to themselves or to those it can ‘trust’ one has to assume that, in fact, they are not confident about the results going in their favour. The problem is that this is denying some very talented, young IO econometricians a chance to study an interesting problem and contribute to public debates.

I also told the Committee that I hoped that (a) the underlying FuelWatch prices would be easily available and that the government should be proactive in making it available for use by entrepreneurs (unlike the toilet situation) and (b) that consideration be given to running trials of different mechanisms for FuelWatch including going away from the 24 hour pricing rule.

Senator Fielding then asked me about the position of independents. I said that I thought they had much more to worry about than FuelWatch (e.g., shopper dockets and chains). Also, I thought that if it moved the basis of competition to price and away from branding it would be an opportunity for them. Funnily enough for a conservative, he seemed to be implying that we shouldn’t want market forces to do their job in petrol retailing. What a tangled web politics is. I really hope we will be done with the whole FuelWatch thing soon.

I am testifying before the Senate on FuelWatch today (more on that after the event). But Bill Tancer writing on the Freakonomics blog has an interesting post today on consumer behaviour and petrol prices. He shows that there is a correlation between the level of petrol prices and consumer visits to websites allowing them to find the cheapest deals. Here is his graph

and here is what he writes as he delves down into the demographics:

To understand this trend further, I analyzed the demographics of visitors to the most visited gas comparison site, gasbuddy.com, over the last four weeks. Visitors to the site were predominantly older (49.57 percent of site visitors were 55 years old or older) with fixed or lower incomes and 47.34 percent were from households earning under $60,000 per year).

This is a dramatic departure from the demographics of that same site in June 2007. At that time, the largest income segment of visitors to the site was households earning over $150,000 per year (25.69 percent). Today the upper income segment accounts for only 9.6 percent of Gasbuddy’s site visitors.

So this tells us who the government is likely to pick up votes from as a result of FuelWatch. No wonder the Coalition can afford to be dead against it.

So according to this report, eBay is taking extraordinary measures to protect buyers and sellers in the sale of iPhones.

All of a sudden, PayPal exclusivity is back (perhaps stronger as it is not clear COD is possible). I am not sure if the restriction applies in Australia but, if so, it will be interesting to see what the ACCC has to say about this.

The ACCC’s GroceryChoice website is up. Comparisons with FuelWatch will abound. But where FuelWatch provides price information for each and every petrol station, GroceryChoice doesn’t do that. You put in your postcode and it recognises your broad regional location (eg., Inner Melbourne East). Then it tells you for various baskets of grocery categories (e.g., meat & seafood, personal care, etc) what the ACCC’s selected sample of goods costs at Coles/Bi-Lo, Woolworths/Safeway and the rest. And the price is not today’s price but likely two weeks ago as the survey is only done monthly and published the next month.

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“I am Rich” costs $999.99 and you get a simple screen that verifies that you bought the app and so are rich. I think there are much more expensive ways to show that. For instance, you could buy your children this (or if you don’t have children, better still!)

While AussieMac was designed as a long-term proposal, the biggest criticism we still get is that the market will bounce back and so government intervention is not needed. (Of course, the government is intervening, just not transparently and in a way that will favour all lenders and competition).

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Last week, Google offered something called CalDAV syncing between Google Calendar and Apple’s iCal. Previously, you had to use a program like BusySync or SpanningSync to do this. So it sounded like Google was wiping out this market with a free option. I had SpanningSync before and kept it going because changing seemed a hassle but I wondered whether I would renew my subscription.

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So you might think that Australia was a year late getting the iPhone. Well, spare a thought for Vermont (yes, a State in the “United” States) that still doesn’t have it because AT&T isn’t there. So they have been importing jailbroken ones like much of the world. Apparently, there is good news for them in the near future.

I have been in support of doing something real (that is, not free but tradable permits) about trade-exposed industries not to support those industries per se but to support effective environment policy. I just don’t want Australia to claim credit for emissions reductions that are merely outsourced and off the balance sheet of local accountability.

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The ACCC Grocery Inquiry Report is out. And the dramatically anticipated conclusion: it is normal, normal, normal. It has two big chains (Coles and Woolworths) that occupy 50 - 70 percent of the space depending upon what you are looking at (which is much better than the situation in telecommunications or airlines). And there are a number of other players, most of whom are beholden to a single supplier of goods (Metcash) who knows it is their only lifeline to stock and sets wholesale prices accordingly. There are some minor issues with site regulations that the ACCC says should be freed up but otherwise you get the feeling that they were struggling to say something, anything. Some have argued that the ACCC will have a tough role finding a new Petrol Commissioner but in reading this report, having something to do with groceries is likely to cause potential candidates to die of boredom.

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ACCC Commissioner, Stephen King, has been appointed as the new Dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics at Monash University. He will take up the post on the 19th January next year.

This is a terrific appointment (for Monash anyway). Of course, I would say that. Stephen is my former colleague here at the University of Melbourne and partner at CoRE Research. We have co-authored some 29 papers and several books together. These days it is rare to see Universities appoint accomplished international researchers, teachers and public intellectuals to leadership positions. Kudos to Monash for seeking out the real opportunities.

Google street view has come to Australia. Apparently that was not lost on an MBS student who early one morning clearly waved as the Google car went by.

A speech by Obama.

Gregory Clarke, whose book A Farewell to Alms, sparked much blogosphere discussion last year gave a talk at Melbourne Business School yesterday. I haven’t read the book myself (I guess history can wait in these busy times) but Clark’s thesis is that it is hard to point to big changes that led to the Industrial Revolution in England in the late 18th century. For instance, institutions seem to have been pretty stable and even movements like the enclosure of common lands occurred slowly and with an economic return not much greater than the cost of enclosing. For him, the big fact seems to be that for several hundred years prior to this time, the rich in England tended to have children who survived much more than the poor (at twice the rate). He argues that this altered the composition of the English population and was the big change that caused the Industrial Revolution. Clark talked less about the mechanism of this change — it could be genetic or cultural (although he appears to lean towards the genetic) — but even so, how this caused an economic and technological revolution is another matter. Nonetheless, the point that fertility rates were so much high amongst the rich relative to others and that this was a sustained and fairly unique event in global terms (e.g., it wasn’t going on elsewhere then or now), is provocative.

For more, you can view interview with Gregory Clark conducted by Chris Gondek discussing his book (click to view podcast) or visit Greg Clark’s website

I have an opinion piece in The Age today [over the fold] about government information that remains hard to access and the stifling effects this has on entrepreneurial activity (in this case, my own). Hopefully, FuelWatch will not become another example of this.

Update: lots of interesting and related stuff: The New Yorker on blocking patents, a UK taskforce to free up public information and thanks to persistence, a breakthrough on Hansard.

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