Argentina has long been a tea provider with diverse types and variants dispatched to the internal market and abroad. The drink and its variants are a popular complement to other infusions such as yerba mate and coffee. We scraped an extensive online price database for analyzing the tea products offered in local supermarkets. We use a panel data modeling approach and test if attributes are associated with pricing and price discounting in the retail tea market. We control the estimations for time effects and exchange rate metrics because of the unstable macroeconomics. Time effects are highly significant and robust across estimations: we detect weekly, seasonal patterns, and yearly cycles. Attributes such as brand and variety play a weaker role in pricing but a stronger one in promotions.

En este trabajo se analizan las variaciones semanales en el precio de 300 presentaciones de yerba mate publicadas en línea, para el período comprendido entre diciembre de 2015 y febrero del 2021, considerando atributos propios del producto, eventos temporales, costos y fluctuaciones cambiarias, recurriendo a estimaciones econométricas basadas en Efectos Aleatorios (EA) y Mínimos Cuadrados Generalizados. Factibles (MCGF). Los resultados derivados estas estimaciones, presentan significatividad para todos los grupos de variables explicativas consideradas. El impacto de cada una de ellas resulta ser desigual sobresaliendo el tipo de cambio oficial y logaritmo del precio promedio como las que mayor influencia tienen sobre la decisión de variar el precio de venta.

Proporcionamos información sobre el aceite de oliva virgen extra (AOVE) en una región de Argentina donde los olivares y su industrialización representan un pequeño sector en crecimiento, por lo que el proceso de diferenciación por atributos emerge como relevante. Analizamos el rol de los atributos y diversas otras variables de control sobre la variación semanal de precios del AOVE; al respecto, suponemos que la baja demanda del producto aún hace que sus compradores carezcan de información y, por ende, no valoren esos atributos. Presentamos información econométrica en un contexto de alta inestabilidad macroeconómica, cuyos resultados muestran que la mayoría de los atributos de producto no resultaron significativos por lo que se infiere que las empresas asocian sus precios al único atributo significativo: su marca. Luego, las variables que indican inestabilidad macroeconómica resultaron en su mayoría significativas configurando una situación de fijación de precios más asociada a sortear la inestabilidad macroeconómica que a utilizarlo como una efectiva política de comercialización.

Damages for personal injuries is a field prone to gender biases. Empirical exploration of the issue, however, is far from being simple, especially in Civil Law countries, given a pervasive lack of transparency and explicitness on the details of reasoning and treatment of numerical values. Accounting for that feature, our research sketches a canon of analysis that goes beyond the words. To deal with risks of cherry picking and inaccurate sample design, our database encompasses all the decisions made during the span time selected (more than 20,000) by an Appellate Court. Scrapers designed ad hoc have been instrumental to that aim. In our case study, the well-known earnings gap, usually assumed a cause of other, second order gaps, ought not to be mirrored in magnitude by pecuniary damages, because the “shadow price” of non-remunerated activities must be computed together with earnings lost, what should counterbalance the latter derivative gap. Nonpecuniary damages, in turn, must be independent of earnings, being theoretically free from that effect. Nonetheless, we found differences with statistical significance in any of them, in favor of men. Some reverse engineering in search of the primary source of the gap leads to find a systematic bias in percentages of disability against women, even in cases where the predictable result should be the opposite. In more general terms, the said obscurity on the treatment of numerical values, usually covered by rhetoric, renders difficult any honest scrutiny of systematic biases on the matter without the assistance of high technology and some sophistication, and shields decisions to criticism. Accordingly, it helps perpetuate gaps whenever existed.