About

About Signal Room

Signal Room is an independent publication of quarterly quantitative briefs on Australian consumer policy questions. It is written by Priya Nazarian.

The publication

Signal Room was founded in mid-2023 to publish work on Australian consumer policy questions using the empirical methods that policy think-tanks apply to bigger topics. The theory of the publication is that many everyday consumer questions — payments, banking, gambling, insurance, telecoms — deserve the same standard of quantitative work that gets applied to fiscal policy or industry structure. That work is not being done at retail scale in Australia. Signal Room is a modest attempt to close some of that gap.

Briefs are released quarterly, are footnoted where sources are external, and are supported by test panels that measure the object of analysis directly where possible. The current panel programme covers Australian consumer payment rails, with the payid-pokies subset described in Brief 12 and its companions.

Priya Nazarian, the analyst

Priya spent seven years at the Australian Bureau of Statistics in the economic-analysis division, working on household expenditure surveys and consumer-price indexing. She then spent three years at the Grattan Institute working on household finance policy questions. She left Grattan in late 2022 to start Signal Room.

She is not a financial adviser, not a lawyer, and not a gambling counsellor. Signal Room's briefs are analysis, not advice. Readers seeking personal financial guidance, legal counsel, or gambling harm-reduction support should consult appropriately qualified professionals.

Editorial independence and commercial arrangements

Signal Room accepts no direct advertising from operators of any of the services it analyses. Some outbound links to third-party services are affiliate-tracked; these are disclosed at the point of use. Editorial ranking, recommendation, and criticism in briefs is independent of any commercial arrangement. Where an affiliate relationship exists with a service that the brief discusses critically, the affiliate arrangement does not modify the criticism.

Readers who identify errors, disagree with methodology, or wish to challenge a specific claim are invited to write in. Corrections are published where warranted, and methodology notes are updated when a challenge is well-founded.