Using web scraping to construct a world first alcohol retail pricing system to inform evidence-based alcohol policies

Investigators: Dr Tina Lam, Prof Dennis Petrie, Dr Brian Vandenberg, Sam Campbell, Prof Suzanne Nielsen

Funder: Monash Data Futures Institute

Alcohol is the leading risk factor for premature death and disability among people aged 15-49, and is one of the leading preventable causes of community harms such as family violence. Globally, government policies related to raising prices have been the most effective and least costly interventions to reduce alcohol-related harm, in both general and high-risk populations. However, policy makers do not have access to real-time price information for the development and evaluation of price policies.

This project will use web scraping technology to monitor daily fluctuations in prices across the Australian alcohol retail sector (~100M rows of price data per year). We will provide the most comprehensive price-based examinations of the retail alcohol market available across any for-profit economy, in order to inform the implementation of effective health policies to prevent alcohol harm.

Publications

Lam T, Huang C, Torney A, Callinan S, Vandenberg B, Xia T, Angus C, Room R, Ogeil R, Cowper A, Pettigrew S, Rowland B, Keric D, Lubman D, Nielsen S. (2026).  Leveraging web-scraped data to examine alcohol pricing: an Australian feasibility study with retail data. International Journal of Drug Policy.