TPRC Programs and Papers Archive: Abstract
| Title: Who Signed Up for the Do-Not-Call List?
Author(s): Hal Varian, Fredrik Wallenberg, Glenn Woroch Comments: Conf Year: 2005 (ID: 494) Download: [ PDF ] Abstract: This paper employs the results of a natural experiment to measure household demand for a particular kind of privacy. Using the phone numbers registered with the Federal Trade Commission’s national do-not-call (DNC) list, we identify key demographic and economic determinants of household decisions to block unsolicited telemarketing calls. Nesting a discrete choice model of household decision to register their numbers, with a model of telemarketers’ decisions to attempt calls, reveals factors affecting signup frequencies. The more than 60 million registered phone numbers are mapped into counties and then matched with household demographic information from the 2000 Census plus several behavioral variables from national panel datasets. Regressions of county-level signup frequencies on individual demographic variables reveal that participation in the DNC registry is directly related to household income, educational attainment, home mortgage and linguistic integration, while irregular patterns emerge for household size and the ages of children and the head of household. We estimate grouped logits of signup frequencies on various combinations of the demographic variables plus interactions with state DNC lists and state dummies. We find that a parsimonious specification including just income, teenaged kids, low education, and whether the state maintains and merges its list explains nearly the same fraction of variance as the full set of demographic variables. We find that states that maintained a DNC list that is subsequently merged with the national list have significantly higher signup rates, while those that declined to merge their lists have significantly lower rates, suggesting that a state list is a close substitute for the national one. |
