Empirical exploration of factors that determine multiple mobile phone subscriptions

Abstract

This study addresses the factors driving multiple mobile phone subscriptions by consumers in the Swedish market. The generalised Poisson model GPR is applied to count data obtained from two national annual surveys. The results show that business subscription and household size are consistently the main predictors of the multiple mobile phone subscriptions. This indicates that organisations, i.e., company and household, are important units of consumers in the mobile market that potential for expanding the consumers base. Demographics characteristics such as age, income and gender in addition to the use of mobile internet are also found as significant predictor. The operator could gain from this situation by applying relevant marketing strategies to the targeted consumers' segment as well as tightening the network effect to the relevant consumers' social group. This may be done by encouraging them to have additional subscriptions from the same operator or intra-operator multiple subscriptions, for instance through service bundling or collective subscriptions.