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The purpose of this paper is to explain the determinant factors of switching behavior in the Thai cellular market before the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) policy is implemented.

A binary logit model and individual survey data from the National Telecommunications Commission 2009 are used to estimate the intention of mobile phone consumers to switch.

The results show that subscriber characteristics, including age, government officer, self‐employed, internet use, central region, and southern region, are significant in explaining the switching behavior of Thai mobile subscribers. They also indicate that the mobile operators' customers are confronted with different switching costs. The subscribers of the largest mobile operator have the highest switching costs. This study also shows that the largest mobile operators will gain more switching subscribers than smaller operators. The implementation of MNP will help to lower the switching costs of smaller mobile operators rather than of larger operators, as the subscribers of smaller operators are more likely to switch and move to larger mobile operators, as the larger operators provide better quality network coverage. The study shows that the expected impact of implementing MNP without national mobile roaming regulations would be worse for smaller mobile operators. The smaller operators need to compete on both price and quality improvement. In the short run, it would not be possible for the smaller operators to compete with the larger operators due to the inequality in the quality of network coverage.

The result is useful to developing countries considering implementing MNP regulation.

A good decision support system for credit scoring enables telecom operators to measure the subscribers' creditworthiness in a fine-grained manner. This paper aims to propose a robust credit scoring system by leveraging latent information embedded in the telecom subscriber relation network based on multi-source data sources, including telecom inner data, online app usage, and offline consumption footprint.

Rooting from network science, the relation network model and singular value decomposition are integrated to infer different subscriber subgroups. Employing the results of network inference, the paper proposed a network-aware credit scoring system to predict the continuous credit scores by implementing several state-of-art techniques, i.e. multivariate linear regression, random forest regression, support vector regression, multilayer perceptron, and a deep learning algorithm. The authors use a data set consisting of 926 users of a Chinese major telecom operator within one month of 2018 to verify the proposed approach.

The distribution of telecom subscriber relation network follows a power-law function instead of the Gaussian function previously thought. This network-aware inference divides the subscriber population into a connected subgroup and a discrete subgroup. Besides, the findings demonstrate that the network-aware decision support system achieves better and more accurate prediction performance. In particular, the results show that our approach considering stochastic equivalence reveals that the forecasting error of the connected-subgroup model is significantly reduced by 7.89–25.64% as compared to the benchmark. Deep learning performs the best which might indicate that a non-linear relationship exists between telecom subscribers' credit scores and their multi-channel behaviours.

This paper contributes to the existing literature on business intelligence analytics and continuous credit scoring by incorporating latent information of the relation network and external information from multi-source data (e.g. online app usage and offline consumption footprint). Also, the authors have proposed a power-law distribution-based network-aware decision support system to reinforce the prediction performance of individual telecom subscribers' credit scoring for the telecom marketing domain.

Describes the process and outputs of the findings to date in a research project to determine quality in academic business journal publishing, sponsored by a major academic publishing house. Describes the refereeing/review process for journal articles, a study of quality indicators in established “academic” journals, and the same in “practitioner” journals. Draws conclusions for quality improvement in the journals surveyed based on the findings. Draws conclusions for other researchers and publishers.

This study seeks to investigate the effect of mobile number portability (MNP) on mobile subscribers in Korea by focusing on subscribers' perception and behavior related to MNP.

The study collected data on subscribers who had changed mobile carriers between the beginning of MNP (July 2003) and December 2005. The data were analyzed by statistical analyses such as ANOVA and logistic regression.

Statistical analyses in this study reveal that subscribers perceive the switching barrier still as high, discouraging subscribers from switching carriers. While MNP lowered switching costs considerably, a significant level of switching costs still remains despite MNP. Carriers develop new subscriber lock‐in strategies that make them stay with current carriers. In addition, there are hidden costs other than MNP that should burden subscribers with number portaling.

The findings imply that the MNP has directly affected the industries to a greater extent than subscribers, which suggests implications for both regulators and industries: how to effectively enforce MNP to achieve the intended goals and how to achieve competitive advantage with MNP.

This research is particularly interested in investigating the effect of the introduction of MNP on subscribers' behaviors and perceptions, and therefore their motivations for changing or remaining with mobile carriers (operators) with the introduction of MNP. Although there have been many studies looking at the effect of number portability on competition at the industry level, little attention has been shown on the individual level such as subscribers' behavior or perception.

Evaluates, through deep log analysis, the impact of “Big Deal” agreements on the online searching behaviour of users of the Emerald digital library Web site, which provides access to more than 150 journals in the fields of business and information science. The purpose of the evaluation was to map the online information seeking behaviour of the digital library user and to see whether those signed‐up to a Big Deal arrangement behaved any differently from the others. In general they did. The real surprise proved to be the strong consumer traits of the library’s users. Research reported here refers to the first stage of a three‐stage research project.

The purpose of this paper is to present research evidence on mobile phone sharing practices in a developing country context.

The study adopted an exploratory approach, using a combination of in‐depth interviews, non‐random surveys and field observations of mobile phone users and mobile payphone service providers.

The paper finds that there are multiple dimensions to mobile phone sharing and that it is an important means of giving respondents the ability to communicate under different circumstances of need. However, most research respondents preferred or were aspiring to personal phone ownership and a reduction of the need to share. This preference was demonstrated in respondents' attitudes and actual behavior with respect to sharing phones with family and friends, as well as the use of payphones.

Due to the exploratory and largely qualitative research approach, the findings may not be generalizable. The results provide evidence that could feed into the development of hypotheses about mobile phone sharing practices in similar contexts.

The paper investigates ideas about mobile phone sharing using mixed methods. It draws attention to the importance of research‐based evidence for a fuller understanding of user behavior.

Health care insurance companies often conduct sample surveys of health plan members. Survey purposes include: consumer satisfaction with the plan and members’ health status, functional status, health literacy and/or health services utilization outside of the plan. Vendors or contractors typically conduct these surveys for insurers. Survey results may be used for plans’ accreditation, evaluation, quality improvement and/or marketing. This article describes typical sampling plans and data analysis strategies used in these surveys, showing how these methods may result in biased estimators of population parameters (e.g. percentage of plan members who are satisfied). Practical suggestions are given to improve these surveys: alternate sampling plans, increasing the response rate, component calculation for the survey response rate, weighted analyses, and adjustments for unit non-response. Since policy, regulation, accreditation, management and marketing decisions are based, in part, on results from these member surveys, these important and numerous surveys need to be of higher quality.

The purpose of the study is to discover clusters or homogenous groups of work-from-home (WFH) Internet subscribers in the Philippines based on the attributes of speed, network quality, customer service, after-sales support, price, contract and value for money. Another objective is to determine if the formed clusters are related to the demographic profile.

A total of 275 internet subscribers from Metro Manila were surveyed. K-means cluster analysis using the Hartigan-Wong algorithm was performed on the data to generate the clusters.

Results generated four significant clusters, which were named service value expecters, average expecters, low expecters and high expecters. Most of the subscribers are under the high expecters, followed by the service value expecters. The age and income of the subscribers are the profile that can affect the formulation of clusters in the Internet service industry. Those people in the younger age groups can be seen as more demanding, while older people tend to be content with the Internet service. Counter-intuitively, people with higher income seem to be more easily satisfied with Internet service features, while those people with lower income seem to be more demanding. Educational attainment and the number of household members do not have a direct effect on the formulation of clusters of Internet subscribers.

This is the first study to use cluster analysis in identifying possible segments of WFH Internet subscribers based on Internet service attributes. Its value is the provision of market segments based on which can be the basis for formulating marketing strategies and policies for the telecommunications industry.

To assess the extent to which the owners of mobile telecommunication companies could be said to be internationalised at the end of 2003, and to make comparisons among them.

A database is created, based upon the analysis of 39 mobile telcos' international footprints, which is designed to permit the calculation of the extent of internationalisation based upon two contrasting, but related measures.

A comparison of the internationalisation status of the 39 telcos at the end of 2003 broken down by region.

Some difficulties with measurement of the main variables were met but satisfactorily resolved.

Individual mobile telcos are constantly making comments in the media about their internationalisation strategy. This study provides a context for such comments and provides the opportunity to assess individual overseas investments in the light of a company's existing overseas profile.

The approach employed for the assessment of internationalisation is entirely new and unique.

Mobile telecommunication service providers endeavor to mitigate the declining voice service revenue through popularization of mobile value‐added services (MVASs). To understand determinants that influence mobile phone subscribers' intentions to use MVASs, this study aims to investigate the influences of perceived playfulness and information systems (IS) quality on mobile phone subscribers' intentions to use MVASs.

An online survey involving 304 subjects was conducted, followed by a partial least squares (PLS) analysis, which yielded strong evidence in support of our proposed research model.

The results confirmed that information quality, system quality, and service quality serve as important antecedents of perceived ease of use and usefulness among mobile phone subscribers. Additionally, the authors found that the perceived playfulness of MVASs mediates the influence of perceived ease of use on intentions of mobile phone subscribers to adopt the services. The comparison between experienced and inexperienced users also suggests that inexperienced subscribers are attracted to MVASs that satisfy their need for information or play, whereas experienced subscribers tend to take into account system and service qualities.

Self‐selection within the online data collection process was unavoidable; in addition, this study was unable to perform a comparison across different mobile phone subscriber groups and was limited to those MVASs available at the time of data collection.

The results of this study can assist mobile telecommunication service providers in understanding the critical determinants that influence mobile phone subscribers' decisions to adopt MVASs. Besides IS quality factors, the results suggest that service providers should also value the quality of perceived playfulness, which reflects user engagement and enjoyment of the services, beyond usefulness alone.

This study contributes to the understanding of MVAS adoption by introducing IS quality factors and perceived playfulness to current theoretical models; and, furthermore, provides sound evidence that information quality, system quality, service quality, and perceived playfulness are critical factors that influence consumer decisions to adopt these services.