Essays in Telecommunications Policy and Management
Creators: name: Matos, Miguel Godinho De
Publisher: name: Carnegie Mellon University
Year: 2013
Subjects: subject: 160510 Public Policy
subject: FOS: Political science
subject: FOS: Political science
subject: 99999 Engineering not elsewhere classified
subject: FOS: Other engineering and technologies
subject: FOS: Other engineering and technologies

description: This work comprises three independent essays in Telecommunications Policy<br>and Management. <br>In the first study we focus on the deployment of green field next generation<br>access network infrastructures when the national regulatory authority has the<br>power to define geographical markets at sub-national level for which it can apply<br>differentiated regulatory remedies - Geographically Segmented Regulation<br>(GSR). Using a game theory model that we developed, we confirm the asymmetric<br>business case for the geographic development of these new infrastructures:<br>highly populated areas are likely to develop into competitive telecommunication<br>markets while regions with low household density will only see limited investment<br>and little or no competition. We show that supply side interdependencies<br>among markets make the implementation of GSR non-trivial, namely, we show<br>that changes in the wholesale access price in one market can have undesirable<br>consequences in the competitive conditions of interrelated regions where<br>wholesale prices are unchanged. In the second study we focus on how individual purchase decisions are influenced by the behavior of others in their social circle. We study the case of<br>the diffusion of the iPhone 3G across a number of communities sampled from<br>a dataset provided by a major mobile carrier in one country. We find that<br>the propensity of adoption increases with the proportion of each indivudal's<br>adopter friends. We estimate that 14% of iPhone 3G adoptions in this carrier<br>were due to peer influence. We provide results from several policy experiments<br>that show that with this level of effect from peer influence the carrier would<br>hardly be able to significantly increase sales by selectively targeting consumers<br>to benefit from viral marketing. <br>Finally, in the third study, we perform a randomized field experiment to<br>determine the role that likes play on the sales of movies in Video-on-Demand<br>(VoD). We use the VoD system of a large telecommunications provider during<br>half a year in 2012. The system suggests movies to consumers ordered by the<br>number of consumer likes they obtained in previous weeks. We manipulated<br>such natural order by randomly swapping likes across movies. We found that<br>movies promoted (demoted) increased (decreased) sales, but the amount of information<br>publicly available about movies affected the result. Better known<br>movies were less sensitive to manipulations. Finally a movie promoted (demoted)<br>to a fake slot sold 15.9% less (27.7% more) than a true movie placed at<br>that slot, on average across all manipulations. A movie promoted (demoted)<br>to a fake slot received 33.1% fewer (30.1% more) likes than a true movie at<br>that slot. Hence manipulated movies tended to move back to their true slots<br>over time. This means that self-fulfilling prophecies widely discussed in the<br>literature on the effect of ratings on sales are hard to sustain in markets with<br>costly goods that are sufficiently well-known.