Newspaper Reports and Consumer Choice: Evidence from the Do Not Call Registry
研究发现新闻媒体报道显著增加了消费者在“请勿来电”登记处的注册量，且报道中提及免费电话号码、网址以及他人注册人数会增强这一影响。
Despite annual expenditures on public relations exceeding $19.42 billion, U.S. businesses lack practical guidance about the effectiveness of publicity in mass media. Here, we assemble a rich and novel data set to gauge the impact of news reports on consumer sign-ups with the U.S. Do Not Call (DNC) Registry. Using multiple identification strategies, we found robust evidence that news reports increased consumer registrations. Specifically, a 1% increase in the number of news reports increased DNC registrations by 0.018%. The impact increased with mention of the toll-free telephone number and URL, but decreased with the length of the headline and main text. Furthermore, we found evidence that reports affect behavior through persuasion as well as information—the impact on registration was higher for reports that mentioned the number of other people registering. Finally, the impact of news reports on consumer registration was stronger in national than local newspapers and in politically neutral and Democrat than Republican newspapers. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors.