Strategic confusopoly: evidence from the UK mobile market

Christos Genakos (), Tobias Kretschmer and Ambre Nicolle

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Do firms strategically confuse their customers? Using a detailed dataset covering virtually all mobile phone tariffs and their handsets in the UK between January 2010 and September 2012, we examine the co-evolution of prices with the differentiation and overlap of operators' product portfolios. Incorporating the fact that mobile tariffs are multidimensional and hard to compare but easy to imitate and cheap to launch, we argue that firms introduced a large number of dominated tariffs as an obfuscation strategy. We show that the increase in dominated tariffs correlates with the increase in average prices despite converging product portfolios. This exploratory study is one of the first to offer suggestive evidence of the existence and role of obfuscation as a firm strategy.

Keywords: words; competitive strategy; obfuscation; mobile telecommunications industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L10 L20 L96 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2021-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-pay and nep-reg
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/113835/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Strategic confusopoly: evidence from the UK mobile market (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:113835

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().