As noted by Business Insider UK, a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper attempts to infer demographics based on people’s consumer behavior or media consumption. The researchers found that “no individual brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone,” based on 2016 data.
The economists at the University of Chicago found that owning an iPhone gave them a 69% chance to correctly infer that the owner was “high-income,” which they defined as being in the top quartile of income for households of that type. Apple smartphones being closely correlated with high income is a recent trend, according to the research.
“Knowing whether someone owns an iPad in 2016 allows us to guess correctly whether the person is in the top or bottom income quartile 69 percent of the time,” according to the paper. The researchers used data from Mediamark Research Intelligence, which had a sample size of 6,394. The data includes bi-annual questionnaires as well as information like household income from a face-to-face interview.
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