Abstract
This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of mobile telecommunication markets, in exploring how structure, technological investments of players and regulation have affected prices of services; but also in measuring the magnitude of consumer inertia and myopia in a rapidly evolving environment. The first chapter investigates determinants of mobile services price drop in France between 2011 and 2014.Based on a hedonic price regression, this study provides evidence of introduction of a new technology and competition being responsible for most of the price reduction. The second chapter questions howinter-temporal trade-off of consumers selecting a handset and a tariff has been affected by the increasing availability of sim-only contracts. Estimating a discrete choice model based on choice setswhich combine extensive number of tariffs and handsets, it is possible to capture an average level of consumer’s myopia. Results show myopia decreased along with emergence of sim-only contracts and converge towards a value which is close to what has been estimated in other markets, meaning consumers only exhibit a modest undervaluation of future. The third chapter measures the magnitude inertia in repeated choice of smartphones. Exploiting data of handset switchings between 2012 and 2014 of sim-only consumers, we estimate discrete choice models to estimate switching costs between brandsand operating systems. We then rely on our model to simulate market shares without inertia and showthat the market share of Android and smaller operating systems would increase at the expense of the market share of iOS.