HK Funeral Directory

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Price Transparency Index: methodology

Audited 2026-08-06. Any figure from this index must be cited together with the rules on this page. A number not computed by this method may not be described as a statistic from this dataset.

1. Population and denominator

2. Definitions

Has a website
A website URL is on record for that licensed entity. The numerator counts licensed entities, not domains — three pairs of licensed entities share a website, so counting domains would mix units.
Publishes own prices
That merchant’s own funeral service or package price is readable on its public pages. Market-rate estimates, industry averages, course fees, merchandise prices and customary gift amounts do not count.
States government-fee treatment
The page states explicitly that government charges (cremation fee, death certificate) are or are not inside the quoted price. This records what the page says, not what is actually charged — we have not confirmed the arrangement with any merchant, so the index marks only “the site states this” with a star and never displays “included” as established fact. A merchant whose page is silent carries no mark; the absence is missing information, not an adverse finding.

3. What was audited

Only the 49 merchants with a website on record were audited page by page; the other 97 have no website and so cannot publish prices. This makes the website measure a floor rather than a point estimate: a systematic sample of 20 of those 97 was re-checked against two independent search engines with no misses found, but rule of three puts the 95% upper bound on the miss rate at 15%, so the true share could be as high as about 41.1%. Always publish it as “at least 33.6%”.

4. Two independent reads

Every figure must survive two mutually independent reads before entering any calculation:

  1. First: fetch the page over HTTP and have a language model read it.
  2. Second: fetch with a different crawler and extract by regular expression.
  3. The two use different crawlers and different extraction paths, so they do not share a failure mode. A mismatch must be investigated and corrected — never silently dropped.

5. What is never scored against a merchant

6. Known limitations

  1. The index measures disclosure — not price level, not service quality. Publishing a price does not make a merchant cheaper, and “government fees included” does not make a total lower.
  2. The website measure is a floor (see section 3).
  3. This is a single-date snapshot. Merchant sites change, so figures must be cited with the audit date.
  4. Package contents are not standardised. Two merchants’ identically named packages may contain different items; the index makes no content comparison.

7. Why no price medians in this edition

A separate dataset records merchant quotes row by row. Publishing a median for any rite, however, requires enough distinct licensed merchants after controlling for venue — a hospital-departure funeral and a parlour wake have entirely different cost structures, and pooling them yields a median matching no real package. Once venue is controlled, no rite reaches the sample threshold, so this edition publishes disclosure statistics only and no median prices.

8. Licence and citation

9. Update cycle

Re-audited quarterly, with each row’s retrieval date updated. Stale rows are quarantined rather than deleted and are used only as clearly labelled historical comparison.

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