JSM 2004 - Toronto

Abstract #300671

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Activity Number: 162
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Monday, August 9, 2004 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
Abstract - #300671
Title: Measurement of Mail Volumes--An Application of Model Assisted Estimation
Author(s): Stephen Woodruff*+ and Feng Lan
Companies: United States Postal Service and United States Postal Service
Address: 475 L'Enfant Plaza SW , Washington, DC, 20260-5328,
Keywords: robust estimation ; superpopulation model ; regression
Abstract:

When foreign countries dispatch mail to the United States, they pay the U.S. Postal Service a portion of the costs to sort, transport, and deliver that mail to its final U.S. address. The System for International Revenue and Volume Inbound (SIRVI) captures pieces and weight data from foreign origin mail entering the United States. Unfortunately, mail processing generally has a higher priority than measuring the quantity of mail delivered. This means that sample control is marginal and a probability sample based estimator could not be properly implemented. This paper describes a more robust procedure based on a regression superpopulation model, an application of work done by Royall, et al. The constraints that mail processing places on survey design and inference are also briefly described. Several estimators are evaluated by simulation and theoretically in the product space of the sampling distribution and the superpopulation model.

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Revised March 2004