Of the 40 companies that competed, Catalist came in second place.
It should give us confidence that Catalist's matching procedures are essentially at the state-of-the-art.
But, Catalist had to do the linkage using imperfect identifiers,
in this case name, gender, birth year, and home address.
Fortunately, Catalist's reports were close to the withheld values, indicating that Catalist could match partial voter records onto their
master data file.
Obtained official listing on SESDAQ(now known as Catalist) on 27 September 1999 after the successful
initial public offering of 16 million shares.
In practice, matching is a difficult and messy process, and,
to make matters worse for the researchers, Catalist considered its matching technique to be proprietary.
The process of combining many sources of administrative records into a master datafile-
the process that Catalist employs- is common in the statistical offices of some national governments.
It is important to note that although Ansolabehere and Hersh were encouraged by the quality of data from Catalist, other evaluations of commercial vendors have
been less enthusiastic.
Ansolabehere and Hersh partnered with one of these companies- Catalist LCC- in order to use their
master voting file to help develop a better picture of the electorate.
For example, Catalist had to decide if the Homie J Simpson
in the CCES was the same person as the Homer Jay Simpson in their master data file.
The process of combining many
sources of administrative records into a master datafile- the process that Catalist employees- is common in the statistical offices of some national governments.
Like many of the digital trace sources in Chapter 2, the Catalist master file did not include
much of the demographic, attitudinal, and behavioral information that Ansolabehere and Hersh needed.