Comparing transaction-based and expert-generated price indices in the market for offshore support vessels.

Summary We propose a methodology to generate transaction-based price indices in a heterogeneous physical market and to compare such indices with expert-generated price indices. We apply our framework to the offshore services market using a unique dataset of around 8,000 transactions. We find that the deviation between our transaction-based indices and shipbrokers’ market indices is positively impacted by the level of dayrates and negatively impacted by the volume of transactions. Our approach is useful for the quality assurance of expert-generated price indices in heterogeneous physical markets such as transportation services.