A Study on the Tariff Index of Mobile Telephony in Korea

Since the opening of the mobile telecommunications market to new entrants in 1996, the mobile telecommunications industry in Korea has transformed into a severely competitive market. Although there are numerous methods to evaluate the effects of the competition policy, the most relevant would be to measure the decreased degree of mobile service tariff. Also, after the Introduction of competition in the market, most carriers launched a variety of new tariff plans, which would satisfy the users′ traffic volume and pattern. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a "mobile tariff index" that would collectively consider all the various tariff plans. This paper aims to develop a mobile tariff Index that would accommodate all the various tariff plans provided by mobile carriers. To develop this mobile tariff index, mobile user′s will first be classified by their traffic volume, and then calculate the average tariffs per minute of each group of users, and lastly weight-average those tariffs per minute. And finally, this paper shows the mobile tariff index by considering those averaged tariffs and the carriers′ market shares to reflect the contribution of individual carriers and the users′ traffic volume.