Mobile Telephony in Emerging Markets: The Importance of Multi-Simming Customers

2015

Rapidly increasing sales of multi-SIM phones, mobile penetration rates above 100% and reported customer behavior all point to the fact that a signicant share of mobile customers in emerging markets tend to use more than one SIM card. A primary motive for this is to avoid making expensive o-net calls. We add a segment of exible prepaid customers, who choose to "multi-sim" in equilibrium, to the seminal model of competing telephone networks a la Laont,