Economics of the Information Economy.

• Position: Conferences

An NBER/Universities Research Conference on the "Economics of the Information Economy" took place in Cambridge on May 7 and 8. Organizers Judith Chevalier, NBER and Yale University, and Joel Waldfogel, NBER and the Wharton School, put together this program:

Hal Varian, Fredrick Wallenberg, and Glenn Woroch, University of California, Berkeley, "Who Signed Up for the Do-Not-Call List?" Thede Loder, Marshall Van Alystyne, and Richard Wash, University of Michigan, "Information Asymmetry and Thwarting Spam"

Discussant: Curtis Taylor, Duke University

Patrick Scholten, Bentley College, "The Propensity to Advertise Price Online: Evidence from Shopper.com" Mark Stegeman, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, "Information Goods and Advertising: An Economic Model of the Internet"

Discussant: Austan Goolsbee, NBER and University of Chicago

Nicholas Economides, New York University, and V. Brian Viard and Katja Seim, Stanford University, "Quantifying the Benefits of Entry into Local Phone Services' Eugenio J. Miravete, University of Pennsylvania, and Lars-Hendrik Roller, Humboldt University, "Competitive Nonlinear Pricing in Duopoly Equilibrium: The Early U.S. Cellular Telephone Industry"

Discussant: Ingo Vogelsang, Boston University

Ron Borzekowski, Federal Reserve Board, "In Through the Out Door: The Role of Outsourcing in the Adoption of Internet Technologies by Credit Union" Paul Gertler, NBER and University of California, Berkeley, and Tim Simcoe, University of California, Berkeley, "Disease Management: Using Standards and Information Technology to Improve Medical Care Productivity"

Discussant: Lisa Lynch, NBER and Tufts University

David Waterman, Indiana University, "The Effects of Technological Change on the Quality and Variety of Information Products" Felix Oberholzer, Harvard University, and Koleman Strumpf, University of North Carolina, "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis" David J. Balan, Pat DeGraba, and Abraham L. Wickelgren, Federal Trade Commission, "Media Mergers and the Ideological Content of Programming"

Discussant: Steven Wildman, Michigan State University

Using the phone numbers registered with the Federal Trade Commission's national do-not-call (DNC) list, Varian, Wallenberg, and Woroch identify, key demographic and economic determinants of household decisions to block unsolicited telemarketing calls. With a model of households' decisions to register phone numbers and telemarketers' decisions to attempt calls, the authors uncover the factors affecting signup frequencies. They map the more than 60 million registered phone numbers into counties and then match them with household demographic information from the 2000 Census, plus several behavioral variables from national panel datasets. Regressions of...