Aggregate Price Indices, New Goods, and Generics
研究生活成本指数中如何处理旧商品的新品种，将理论从单个家庭扩展到家庭群体，并以药品仿制药为例说明正确处理会带来显著差异。
This paper examines the appropriate treatment in the cost-of-living index of the appearance of new varieties of old goods. Existing theory here applies to individual households. Thus, we first show in what sense Laspeyres and Paasche indices for groups of households can be considered approximations to theoretically desirable group indices and then go on to the case of new goods. We apply our results to the case of the introduction of generics in pharmaceuticals and show that proper treatment can make a considerable difference.