An Empirical Analysis of the Factors Determining Multiple Subscriptions in the Swedish Mobile Phone Market

Abstract

This study aims to explain the factors determining multiple subscriptions in the Swedish mobile phone market. A generalized Poisson model of count data from a national survey in Sweden finds that business subscriptions and house-hold size are the main predictors of the multiple mobile phone subscriptions, along with individual demographic characteristics such as, age, gender and type of occupation. Other factors such as education level, area of living, prepaid as the main subscription, as well as mobile Internet and fixed phone subscription are not significant. These facts indicate that business subscriptions and subscriptions for family are the main factors that determine the incidence of multiple subscriptions in the Swedish mobile phone market. The operator can gain from this situation by tightening the network effect to the existing sub-scribers. This can be done by encouraging them to have additional subscriptions from the same operator or intra-operator multiple subscriptions. For the regulator, this situation has to be taken into consideration when determining the Significant Market Power (SMP) since a larger market share does not always indicate actual market domination.