Syed Fahad Sultasn, Hamza Humayun, Umar Nadeem, Z. Bhatti, Sohaib Khan
{"title":"Mobile phone price as a proxy for socio-economic indicators","authors":"Syed Fahad Sultasn, Hamza Humayun, Umar Nadeem, Z. Bhatti, Sohaib Khan","doi":"10.1145/2737856.2737892","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Average mobile phone price of a region's residents has not been explored as a proxy variable for socio-economic indicators in development literature. Using handset models from mobile data logs of a telecom operator, we calculate average phone prices of subscribers at each cell tower, and then find their relationship with indicators from preexisting census data. Our results show that average phone price correlates well (absolute Pearson's correlation coefficient > 0.35 and p-value < 0.01) with indicators of accessibility to services, infrastructure, hygiene and communication, but does not correlate well with literacy variables.","PeriodicalId":210700,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2015-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"5","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2737856.2737892","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 5
Abstract
Average mobile phone price of a region's residents has not been explored as a proxy variable for socio-economic indicators in development literature. Using handset models from mobile data logs of a telecom operator, we calculate average phone prices of subscribers at each cell tower, and then find their relationship with indicators from preexisting census data. Our results show that average phone price correlates well (absolute Pearson's correlation coefficient > 0.35 and p-value < 0.01) with indicators of accessibility to services, infrastructure, hygiene and communication, but does not correlate well with literacy variables.