International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Journal of Management Information Systems - Special issue: Impacts of information technology investment on organizational performance
Spam and the ongoing battle for the inbox
Communications of the ACM - Spam and the ongoing battle for the inbox
Online supervised spam filter evaluation
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail: Empirical Analysis of a Digital Commons
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Pricing electronic mail to solve the problem of spam
Human-Computer Interaction
Information Systems Research
From Association to Causation via a Potential Outcomes Approach
Information Systems Research
Spamalytics: an empirical analysis of spam marketing conversion
Communications of the ACM - The Status of the P versus NP Problem
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Dealing with spam is very costly, and many organizations have tried to reduce spam-related costs by installing spam filters. Relying on modern econometric methods to reduce the selection bias of installing a spam filter, we use a unique data setting implemented at a German university to measure the costs associated with spam and the costs savings of spam filters. Our methodological framework accounts for effect heterogeneity and can be easily used to estimate the effect of other IS technologies implemented in organizations. The majority of costs stem from the time that employees spend identifying and deleting spam, amounting to an average of approximately five minutes per employee per day. Our analysis, which accounts for selection bias, finds that the installation of a spam filter reduces these costs by roughly one third. Failing to account for the selection bias would lead to a result that suggests that installing a spam filter does not reduce working time losses. However, cost savings only occur when the spam burden is high, indicating that spam filters do not necessarily reduce costs and are therefore no universal remedy. The analysis further shows that spam filters alone are a countermeasure against spam that exhibits only limited effectiveness because they only reduce costs by one third.