Numerator

Years Available: Starting from 2017 and includes annual updates.

Panelists: Numerator panelists report all categories of purchases, including durable goods, electronics, cannabis, and much more. Data include purchases made via e-commerce and traditional channels for home use/consumption (e.g. grocery, mass, club, c‐store, liquor, etc.)  e‐commerce. 

Fields include, but are not limited to, retailer name, location, purchase payment method, order method, product quantity, unit price, product description, brand description, and more. 

Demographics cover geographic location, marital status, presence of children, employment, education, ethnicity, etc. 

Supplemental demographic attribute data provide self‐report information about media consumption and psychographic characteristics such as device usage, mobile app behaviors, device ownership, streaming services, various health and wellness, housing, sports fandom, etc.

Types of files: Numerator data are available as multiple files in comma-delimited format, organized by year.

ELIGIBILITY

• Tenured and tenure-track faculty, PhD students, and postdoctoral researchers from The University of Chicago are eligible to have direct access to Numerator data from the Kilts Center.
• Each individual eligible to access the data must have a subscription at her/his own home institution.
• Each eligible researcher accessing the data must register and have approval from the Kilts Center.
• All eligible researchers employed full-time by and/or enrolled as a student.
• Coauthors outside of The University of Chicago may be coauthors but are prohibited from accessing the data.
• Approved researchers (e.g., faculty, PhD students, and postdocs) may work with support staff (e.g., research assistants, research professionals) from their own institution. Support personnel do not register. Instead, the approved researcher is responsible for obtaining and ensuring security of the data.
• Access by PhD students or postdoctoral researchers requires an advisor who is a full-time tenured or tenure-track professor from The University of Chicago. The PhD student or postdoc and the faculty advisor are each required to register.
• PhD students who graduate and take a job outside of an accredited academic institution are no longer eligible to access data.

PROJECT CRITERIA

• Researchers may only use the data for strictly academic research projects focused on important issues of wide and general interest.
• Narrowly focused projects on subjects of interest only to specific industries or firms may be declined by Numerator.
• Use of the Numerator data for consulting purposes of any kind, including litigation support, is strictly prohibited.
• Projects with the primary purpose of evaluating Numerator’s data-collection approach or methodologies will not be approved.
• Researchers must not disclose any personally identifiable information (PII) about consumer panelists or details that would permit the re-identification of Numerator’s consumer panelists.

USE REQUIREMENTS

• Every researcher who will access the data must register with the Kilts Center a detailed description of each project. Each paper a researcher anticipates writing should be its own project.
• Researchers must disclose any changes to their project scope, coauthors, or funding sources during the course of their research.
• Every researcher must submit an annual status update.
• Data must be stored only on devices and computers owned by the subscribed institution or permissible Third Party Hosting Systems. The permissible Third Party Hosting Systems must have at least one of the following information security certifications: (a) federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA); (b) SSAE16 SOC2; and/or (c) ISO27001 security certifications. No amount of data should ever be stored on a personal computer.
• Within 15 days of a subscription end date or deactivation, each researcher must provide all papers, complete a final report, and provide signed verification that she/he destroyed and purged all copies of the data during deactivation.

PAPERS AND PUBLICATION POLICIES

• Researchers must submit all copies of proposed papers, reports, presentations, abstracts, dissertations, manuscripts, journal articles, and any other publication type to the Kilts Center at least 30 days prior to any public dissemination, including SSRN and submission to journals. Any distributed materials may include only limited excerpts of Numerator information—“limited excerpt” means such portion of the Numerator data that would not ordinarily substitute for a purchase of access to the Numerator datasets.
• Thirty (30) days after providing Kilts Center a copy of a working paper, researchers must submit such papers to the Kilts Center at Chicago Booth Marketing Data Center Paper Series at Social Science Research Network (SSRN).
• Researchers are required to notify the Kilts Center of publications resulting from their work with the data, even after they have stopped using the data.

For presentations, working papers, journal articles, dissertations, and publications, researchers must include the following disclaimers: 

“Researcher(s) own analyses calculated (or derived) based in part on data from The Numerator Company (US), LLC and marketing databases provided through the Numerator Datasets at the Kilts Center for Marketing Data Center at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.”

“The conclusions drawn from the Numerator data are those of the researcher(s) and do not reflect the views of Numerator. Numerator is not responsible for and had no role in analyzing or preparing the results reported herein.”