Evaluating wireless carrier consolidation using semiparametric demand estimation
By: Patrick Bajari, Jeremy T. Fox, Stephen Ryan
Contributors: Fox, Jeremy T.; Ryan, Stephen (Writer on marketing); National Bureau of Economic Research
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 12425; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 12425.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: [electronic resource] /
Description: "The US mobile phone service industry has dramatically consolidated over the last two decades.  One justification for consolidation is that merged firms can provide consumers with larger coverage areas at lower costs.  We estimate the willingness to pay for national coverage to evaluate this motivation for past consolidation.  As market level quantity data is not publicly available, we devise an econometric procedure that allows us to estimate the willingness to pay using market share ranks collected from a popular online retailer, Amazon.  Our semiparametric maximum score estimator controls for consumers' heterogeneous preferences for carriers, handsets and minutes of calling time.  We find that national coverage is strongly valued by consumers, providing an efficiency justification for across-market mergers.  The methods we propose can estimate demand for other products using data from Amazon or other online retailers where quantities are not observed, but product ranks are observed.  Since Amazon data can easily be gathered by researchers, these methods may be useful for the analysis of other product markets where high quality data are not publicly available"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 8/16/2006.

Includes bibliographical references.

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Mode of access: World Wide Web.