Empirical Analysis Of Customer Behavior For Tiered Data Plans In Mobile Market

Smartphone users' requirements for data plans from mobile network access services have become individualized. To cope with users' requirements, global mobile network operators have been replacing.ftat-rate data plans with tiered data plans in the mobile market. In addition, mobile virtual network operators who provide data plans to their own customers at retail prices have emerged in the mobile market. In today's mobile market, customers can therefore choose their preferred data plan from a number of alternatives. There is, however, Iimited knowledge about how sensitively customers react to changed pricing for a data plan. In this paper, we focus on tiered data plans, i.e., specific pairing of price and data capacity, and empirically analyze the utility for customers of the tiered data plans by applying choice-based conjoint analysis. We also evaluate customer behavior through trace-driven simulations to quantify the market share of the given data plans.