In recent years, mobile phone service has become the most popular term of telecommunication service. However, in back of the complex pricing plans and promotion plans, there are some interesting tropics. For example, how does a mobile phone service operator price the on-net and off-net charges? What is the factor that makes the off-net charges more expensively than the on-net one? And which principle is adopted to design the multiple pricing plans by the operators? In this study, we will make some amendment for the Hotelling Model, and set a new model which be called the Psychological Differential Model, that can expectably explain the eventuality which a man has a lot of phone number from different operators simultaneously. Besides, it will add a factor which will derogate the network externalities of the utility of mobile phone service. Mathematically, we use the way of ¡§Two-stage Market Pricing¡¨ to develop the equilibrium of on-net and off-net charges. By the cost pricing method, we can find the access fee will cause off-net charges more expensively than on-net one in the chapter three of this paper. Finally, in the chapter four, this study will introduce the principle of the third price discrimination to explain the outcome of multiple pricing plans.

Abstract This study explores the feasibility of applying mobile phone¡¦s value-added services in attracting adolenscents¡¦ participation in local festival. In recent years, Taiwan¡¦s local governments have been considering how to effectively enhance cultural identities and promote cultural tourism through conducting various kinds of festivals. Against this backdrop, the introduction of using mobile phone for festival marketing is seriously considered. Although adolescents are the group most in need of cultivation of local culture, previous marketing effort proved to be fruitless. Traditional festivals continue attracting visitors from the so-called cultural tourists ¡V those already with cultural knowledge of the tourist site (known as tourist gaze). Usually it was in the ccasion of family tour that adolescents would participate in festivals. Therefore, it has been an issue regarding how to attract adolescents in attending festivals. While adolescents are characterised by the nature of social grouping, plus high flexibility of adopting new technologies, the auther is most interested in how to use mobile phones as a effective means for attracting them to festival places. By conducting a survey of 738 valid samples, generally aged 14-16, from Kaohsiung¡¦s public high schools, the author uses factor analysis to sort out perceiveably the most favorable marketing tools. Short message service (SMS) stands out as the first choice. They also favour value-added services that adds with local culture taste. Particularly they would welcome value-added services that can incorporate role models, favourite products, and group activities into festival marketing. Using adolescents¡¦ familiar jargons will touch their heart as well. This study would contribute to the understanding of Kaohsiung¡¦s adolescents in adopting and using information and communications technologies (ICTs) in general, and whether they would accept mobile marketing for promoting festivals in particular. Hopefully by using this findings as an clue or a guide, local governments and telecommunications operators can design a better-planned and effective festival marketing arrangement which can further help constructs adolescents¡¦ local cultural identity. Keywords: mobile phone, value-added services, festival, marketing, short message, service (SMS)

In light of the niche theory, the study aims to understand the competition among the four telecommunication services, including fixed network telecom, second generation telecom service, third generation telecom service and internet phone in the taiwan market. In this study, we put emphasis on the gratification of the telecom user, because the more gratification the telecom get, the more competition it have. The findings suggest that there are eight factors about the gratification of the telecom consumer, including functional, affection, information-seeking, fashion, uitility, entertainment and pricing structure. In addition , there is strong competition between the fixed network telecom, second generation telecom service, third generation telecom service and internet phone. Four telecom services are good at different factors, therefore, new telecom services would not form competitive displacement for fixed network telecom. Thus, we argue that four telecom services satisfy different consumers needs, and they will survive in different segmentations of telecom market service.

In 1996, the promulgation of the amended Telecommunications Act initiated a series of liberalization in telecommunication industry. From 1998 to 2000, Taiwan had become the most rapid growth area around the world with 130% compound annual growth rate and had marked a milestone with more than 80% of penetration by the end of 2000. This study focuses on the pricing plans offered by the main operators, CHT, TCC and FET, to analyze the pricing strategies and the competition scenarios with one another. In this study, we, first, gather the pricing plans of the operators and then review the history of the price adjustment. At last, we compare the pricing plans across the boundary of the operators. From the history of the price adjustment and the market evolution, we realize that the new subscribers encouraged by low prices are mostly low in airtime usages. The operators discriminates these low airtime users more in prices under the consideration of market competition and profit gaining. From reviewing the pricing plans of the operators respectively, we find the existence of ¡§redundant¡¨ pricing plans, which might bring the operators extra income. From comparison of the pricing plans offered by the three main operators, we conclude the three players try to lower the competition strength by charging high in different segments.

Economic development is often associated with the adoption of new technologies. The three chapters in this dissertation ask how societies can achieve efficient adoption of these technologies. The first two chapters analyze the dramatic spread of a new communication technology---the mobile phone---in the East African country of Rwanda, using transaction data. Many technologies important for the modern economy are network goods; these goods tend to diffuse inefficiently in the absence of careful policy design. The first chapter introduces a new method to estimate the value of a network good, and to simulate the effects of policies. Economic actors also must decide whether a given technology is worth adopting. The second chapter analyzes how individuals learn about a new technology, by tracing the adoption of a new, cheaper mobile phone plan. The third chapter considers the side effects of new technologies, specifically, how innovation affects dimensions of quality that are not observed by consumers. / Economics

Most companies have some sort of business model showing how they operate their activities,resources, cost and revenues etcetera. What is becoming increasingly emphasised in today'sbusiness is however to integrate sustainability within the business model. Our research willtherefore investigate how companies are attempting to make their business model moresustainable. We have chosen to focus on the mobile phone industry as reports have shown thatthey are a significant contributor to carbon emissions and electronic waste. With this in mind ourresearch question is formulated as follows:"How is the mobile phone industry attempting to innovate their business models towardssustainability?"As we attempt to understand how the mobile phone industry is attempting to innovate towardsgreater sustainability, we have chosen to perform a qualitative study. The material we usedconsisted of reports and web pages as well as interviews with manufacturers of mobile phonesand MNO’s. To analyse the material we had collected, we chiefly utilised a list of materialconcerns specific to the aforementioned mobile phone industry stakeholders, a proposedarchetype system for classifying attempts to innovate the business model to become moresustainable and finally a tool for graphically presenting a business model and its inner workings.Our conclusions show what the companies we have interviewed are attempting to innovate intheir business model. The innovations focus mainly on their partnerships, activities, resourcesand value propositions. By performing this study we contribute to the still young research area ofsustainable business model innovation through providing a snapshot of what our interviewedcompanies are attempting to innovate at the time of our study. Furthermore it also contributes tothe empirical use of the proposed sustainable business model innovation archetypes as we applythem to empirical data in an attempt to classify the data. Through performing both of theseactions we also contribute a proposed way of classifying sustainable business model innovationwithin a business model through the combining of the archetypes and the business model canvas.

A consumer research panel is a representative collection of individuals whose consumption habits are continually monitored by a marketing research company. It is designed to study the behaviour rather than the attitudes of consumers in the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. The analysed and interpreted reports help the retailer and manufacturing clients to better understand their markets and the changing dynamics within markets which are largely overseen by retail studies. It is shown that consumer research panels have a very high per panellist cost due to the nature of the data collection methodologies currently used being either very labour-intensive with the in-home interviewer visits, or due to the cost of the technology needed when using an in-home audit terminal to scan the barcode of items. The ubiquitous use of the mobile phone begs the question whether this technology, already in the hands of people, could be used as a data collection device. In 2007, Robert Adelmann demonstrated that it is possible to recognise linear barcodes using a mobile phone equipped with a camera and a barcode recognition algorithm. Three requirements are set for a mobile phone to be used as a data collection device in a consumer panel and are indicated by various studies researching each, focused on Gauteng, South Africa. The technology is shown to be quick and accurate enough to be used in everyday barcode scanning albeit not very prevalent among the responding sample. The data communication infrastructure needed to communicate the audited data was found to be 100% present although few of the respondents displayed their interest in joining a research panel based on mobile phones. It is, therefore, recommended that a phone-based consumer panel be used to supplement existing consumer panels to extend in hard-to-reach demographics like the upper-LSM households, and that the privacy and usage concerns raised by the respondents be addressed. It is also recommended that similar studies be conducted in developed economies where required mobile phone technology could be more prevalent. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2010.

A consumer research panel is a representative collection of individuals whose consumption habits are continually monitored by a marketing research company. It is designed to study the behaviour rather than the attitudes of consumers in the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. The analysed and interpreted reports help the retailer and manufacturing clients to better understand their markets and the changing dynamics within markets which are largely overseen by retail studies. It is shown that consumer research panels have a very high per panellist cost due to the nature of the data collection methodologies currently used being either very labour-intensive with the in-home interviewer visits, or due to the cost of the technology needed when using an in-home audit terminal to scan the barcode of items. The ubiquitous use of the mobile phone begs the question whether this technology, already in the hands of people, could be used as a data collection device. In 2007, Robert Adelmann demonstrated that it is possible to recognise linear barcodes using a mobile phone equipped with a camera and a barcode recognition algorithm. Three requirements are set for a mobile phone to be used as a data collection device in a consumer panel and are indicated by various studies researching each, focused on Gauteng, South Africa. The technology is shown to be quick and accurate enough to be used in everyday barcode scanning albeit not very prevalent among the responding sample. The data communication infrastructure needed to communicate the audited data was found to be 100% present although few of the respondents displayed their interest in joining a research panel based on mobile phones. It is, therefore, recommended that a phone-based consumer panel be used to supplement existing consumer panels to extend in hard-to-reach demographics like the upper-LSM households, and that the privacy and usage concerns raised by the respondents be addressed. It is also recommended that similar studies be conducted in developed economies where required mobile phone technology could be more prevalent. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2010.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The objective of this study was to determine if introducing acceptance and commitment therapy in the prevention of mother to child HIV transmission (PMTCT) program using weekly mobile phone messages would result in improved mental health status of HIV-positive, pregnant women in Nigeria. The study used a quantitative approach using a Solomon four-group (two intervention and two control groups) randomised design to evaluate the impact of an acceptance and commitment therapy program. The study population was 132 randomly selected (33 per site), HIV-positive pregnant women attending four randomly selected PMTCT centres in Nigeria. Two were Intervention and two were Control sites which functioned as Intervention and Control groups. The intervention groups were exposed to one session of acceptance and commitment therapy with weekly value-based health messages sent by mobile phone for three months during pregnancy. The control groups received only post-HIV test counselling.

The information security behaviour of technology users has become an increasingly popular research area as security experts have come to recognise that while securing technology by means of firewalls, passwords and offsite backups is important, such security may be rendered ineffective if the technology users themselves are not information security conscious. The mobile phone has become a necessity for many students but, at the same time, it exposes them to security threats that may result in a loss of information. Students in developing countries are at a disadvantage because they have limited access to information relating to information security threats, unlike their counterparts in more developed societies who can readily access this information from sources like the Internet. The developmental environment is plagued with challenges like access to the Internet or limited access to computers. The poor security behaviour exhibited by student mobile phone users, which was confirmed by the findings of this study, is of particular interest in the university context as most undergraduate students are offered a computer-related course which covers certain information security-related principles. During the restructuring of the South African higher education system, smaller universities and technikons (polytechnics) were merged to form comprehensive universities. Thus, the resultant South African university landscape is made up of traditional and comprehensive universities as well as universities of technology. Ordinarily, one would expect university students to have similar profiles. However in the case of this study, the environment was a unique factor which had a direct impact on students’ learning experiences and learning outcomes. Mbeki (2004) refers to two economies within South Africa the first one is financially sound and globally integrated, and the other found in urban and rural areas consists of unemployed and unemployable people who do not benefit from progress in the first economy. Action research was the methodological approach which was chosen for the purposes of this study to collect the requisite data among a population of university students from the ‘second economy’. The study focuses on the relationship between awareness and behavioural intention in understanding mobile phone user information security behaviour. The study concludes by proposing a behaviour profile forecasting framework based on predefined security behavioural profiles. A key finding of this study is that the security behaviour exhibited by mobile phone users is influenced by a combination of information security awareness and information security behavioural intention, and not just information security awareness.