Price Elasticity from Scanner Data

Estimating price elasticity from scanner data means fitting a store-level sales-response model to the weekly unit-sales, price, and promotion records that retail checkout scanners generate, in order to recover how sensitive demand is to price. The canonical specification is the SCAN*PRO model developed by Dick Wittink, Peter Leeflang, and colleagues: a multiplicative model in which a brand's unit sales in a store-week are a product of relative-price terms raised to elasticity powers and promotion multipliers for feature and display. Taking logarithms turns this into a linear regression whose price coefficients are directly interpretable as own- and cross-price elasticities, while the promotion coefficients become multiplicative lift factors. Pooled across many stores with store-specific intercepts, the model delivers stable, managerially usable elasticities and quantifies the sales lift from promotions. Later work, such as Van Heerde, Gupta, and Wittink, decomposed the promotional sales bump into brand switching, purchase acceleration, and category expansion, refining the interpretation of what an elasticity captures. It is the standard aggregate demand model in retail analytics.