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SOUTH CENTRAL BELL'S KENTUCKY LOCAL TELEPHONE TARIFF EXPERIMENT (1986)

Information: In 1986 South Central Bell conducted an important local telephone tariff experiment in two cities of Kentucky: Bowling Green and Louisville. The data contain detailed demographic information for over five thousand households as well as their detailed local telephone usage for six months (As requested by SCB, telephone numbers have been removed from the data and substituted by a household indicator). I have used this data extensively in my research and you can find detailed description of its features in the following papers:

Estimating Demand for Local Telephone Service with Asymmetric Information and Optional Calling Plans

Choosing the Wrong Calling Plan? Ignorance and Learning

The Welfare Performance of Sequential Pricing Mechanisms

The Role of Self-Selection, Usage Uncertainty, and Learning in the Demand for Local Telephone Service

Rational Attention and Deliberation Costs in a Repeated Decision Problem
Data Format: There are 30,126 observations of 75 variables in an ASCII (text) file.
Files:

SCB_PUBLIC.ZIP: Zipped Text file with the raw data.
SCB_STATISTICS.TXT: Descriptive statistics of the raw data.

SCB_DESCRIPTION.PDF: Data description of the old data set. Disregard the comments about "fixed width fields". The data file SCB_PUBLIC.TXT (compressed as SCB_PUBLIC.ZIP) is just an ascii file with 30,126 times 75 observations separated by spaces.

SCB_KPSC-ORDER.PDF: Memorandum ordering to conduct the tariff experiment

SCB_QUESTIONNAIRE.PDF: Actual questionnaire for the telephone interviews.

SCB_README.TXT: Definition of each variable and labels.