The Research Of Consumer Behavior Of Mobile Communication Under The Uncertainty Of Consumer Demand

Consumer behavior research is becoming the basis of marketing event. The insight into consumer behavior of target market has been the precondition of building competition advantage. There is no lack of consumer behavior research in the Western countries. Professor MacFadden of California University Berkeley US won The Nobel Economics Prize in 2000 for the development and contribution of the consumer choice behavior research. The Scholars in Hong Kong and Taiwan has an early start on the consumer behavior research of China while domesticis research on it is just the beginning. The Better Understanding of consumer behavior appears fairly important and pressing along with the rapid development of chinese mobile communication and the operator’s ARPU constantly droping as the market competition growing up.Thus is helpful to achieving optimistically pricing strategy,designing a marketing srategy and diging the customer value.The above problem has become the new hot topic of institution for scientific research and telecom market researchers.There are two kinds of consumer behaviors in mobile communication.One is choice behavior, the other is usage behavior.There are four features in mobile consumption as follows: non-simultaneity, nonlinear pricing, multi-services and uncertainty of consumer demand. Based on these features, the influence factor and degree, the demand model and elasticity of mobile consumer behavior under the uncertainty of consumer demand are studied from the macro and micro perspectives. Specially, the main contents are as follows:1. In view of the situation of less quantitative study on telecom demand from macro perspective and missing the factor of consumer habits, a quantitative study model feasible and dependable on analyzing Chinese mobile communication demand is proposed using dynamic panel data model and good reality estimation of communication demand by empirical analysis is obtained. After the theoretical research and empirical analysis on model, some important results and conclusions are as follows: consumption habit has a significant impact on the demand of mobile voice, and its entrance in the model can correct the effect of the price of mobile voice service. At the same time, it is also founded that price was a statistically significant factor that influenced demand. Price elasticity is less than one which is different with other researches. This means that the decrease of the price cannot stimulate the same proportional increase of the demand. Both of the price of communication tool and the price of local fixed voice service all have weak impact on the demand of mobile voice service, local fixed voice service is more like a complement rather than a substitute of mobile voice service.2. In view of the situation of lacking of demand researches on different mobile consumer group from macro perspective, the demand function of different group’s consumption of mobile voice service is studied by fixed effect quantile regression model and the characteristics of different consumption-level and the reason are discussed. The model and empirical research show that both price elasticity and income elasticity vary between different consumption-level consumer groups. For low-consumption consumers, income is the most important factor that impacts their consumption, while the price of mobile voice service and the price of communication tools and local fixed voice service all have little effects on consumption; for middle and high consumption consumers, when consumption rise, the price sensitivity of consumers tends to increases, cross-price elasticity of communication tools and local fixed voice service also increase. These results indicate that quantile regression model can give us more detailed and accurate descriptions of demand function than ordinary regression models, and provide us a new method to correctly judge the development stage of the mobile voice service market and then further develop effective marketing strategies.3. Aiming at the problem of domestic quantification research of mobile communication demand for acess and correlative application research of discrete choice model in mobile communication access are both scarce, the major factors that affects consumer choice behavior under three-part pricing according to the pricing feature of mobile communication tariff are analysed.Then choice model of tariff by multivariate Logit choice model is created and probability and elasticity are analysed. Using the data of CMCC consumer, the influence of expected amount of usage and uncertainty of consumer demand on choice action is analysed and validated and Parameters of model are estimated. After the theoretical research and empirical analysis on model, some important results and conclusions are as follows: These results indicate that uncertainty of consumer demand and free call-duration both significantly impair the tariff choices of consumers, but the direction of impacts are different. The elasticity of tariff choice with respect to above two factors are both less than one. Compared with uncertainty of consumer demand, the elasticity of free call-duration is smaller.4. In view of the situation of less researches of self-selection bias and multi-service in demand for usage of mobile consumers, the influence of these factors such as tariff choice and multi-service on usage action of consumer is discussed and the usage model of tariff is created. And a case study is given to validate the methodology based on above conclusion.Then correlations between three factors such as local called duration,message amount accepted,free call-duration and local caller demand are studied.The analysis on model indicates that there are strong correlations among them.These include: the positive correlation between local called duration and local caller demand is observed; message amount accepted has an obvious feedback effect on local caller demand. The confining effect of free call-duration on usage action is more and more obvious with tariff increase. The estimation of model shows that the model is good at avioding self-selection bias after adding the modifying value. These selected three factors have siginificant effect on consumer’s usage and the effects are both positive.5. To cope with the limitations of traditional method of D/C mixed demand and the situation of lacking application of D/C model maily adopted on domestic telecom demand, the extended D/C model adding the three features of mobile consumption such as nonlinear pricing, multi-services and uncertainty of consumer demand are created.Then the probability,selection condition of tariff and elasticity of choice and usage are analyed. At last the method of estimating the model parameter is put forward. The analysis on model indicastes that selection probability of one tariff is relevant to all pricing element such as fixed monthly charge, specific price, free call-duration. The relativity of multi-services affect the the amount of services,but it doesn’t affect the tariff selection probability of consumer. When comparing these two tariffs, the user will balance the benefits and loss of selecting a tariff. The benefits depend on the fixed access fee, and the loss depends on the demand uncertainty and the probability of the use amount exceeding the free quota, the higher the demand uncertainty is, the higher the probability of the volume exceeding the free quota, and then the consumer prefers tariffs that contain higher free quota or or flat-rate tariff.