Pricing Phenomena in the Medical Marijuana Sector: A Big Data Analysis

Andrew Mack

Working Paper from Harvard University OpenScholar

Abstract: This paper provides empirical research on the market for legal marijuana in the United States by using a novel data set assembled by web-scraping prices from the online menus of medical marijuana dispensaries. It longitudinally tracks high frequency price data in various cities. The analysis documents the state average and median price of 'commodity cannabis' for six states over a two year period, 2013-2014, and shows that the trend has been remarkably flat. The paper also looks at city and dispensary price variation for a specific strain of cannabis. This is the first study of its kind to use a large data set of price observations of an illicit drug and hence provides a contribution to the literature on drug economics.

Date: 2015-07
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qsh:wpaper:284476

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