The Future of the New Mobile Telecommunication Terminal in the View of the Consumers' Preferences

소비자 선호 관점에서 본 차세대 무선 이동통신 단말기의 미래

In this paper, we estimate consumers' preferences for the key attributes of the future mobile telecommunication terminal using conjoint analysis. For statistical model, we estimate the mixed legit model which can reflect the heterogeneity of consumers' preferences, using the Bayesian approach with Gibbs sampling. The results show that there are large variations in consumers' preferences for the attributes of the future mobile telecommunication terminal, which justifies our using of mixed logit model. Also, the results show that most consumers prefer the medium size display and keyboard as input equipment. Additionally, far from general prediction, the results show that many consumers are indifferent to whether the future mobile telecommunication terminal is able to provide high quality internet service or not, and to operate many application programs and programs originally designed for PC. From those results, we can obtain some important implications for the R＆D strategies. Additionally, the results on the heterogeneity of consumers' preferences reveal that it is possible that the complete device convergence may not happen.