Database Submission--The ISMS Durable Goods Data Sets

This paper describes two new data sets available to academic researchers (at <ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="http://www.informs.org/Community/ISMS">http://www.informs.org/Community/ISMS</ext-link>). The first is a panel data set containing the transactions of 19,936 households made over the period from December 1998 to November 2004 at a major U.S. consumer electronics retailer. There are a total of 173,262 transactions, including purchases and returns of products as well as extended warranties. There are 16 product categories and 292 subcategories, ranging from big-ticket items such as televisions to small-ticket items such as CDs and batteries. The second data set features a field experiment for a Christmas promotion that took place in December 2003 in the form of a direct mailing sent to a randomly selected group of households at the end of November 2003. We describe the data and the potential research issues that can be studied using these two durable goods data sets.