The Relationship between Mobile Termination Rates and Retail Prices : Some Arguments and Empirical analyses

Abstract

Lately there are many approaches for decreasing the retail prices for mobile telecommunication in response to higher demand of the consumer welfare. Related on this perspective, there have been many disputes how the MTR (mobile termination rate)s from the whole market has influences on the consumer prices at the retail market. Therefore, we need a timely review about the possibility of the reduction of retail prices with MTR policies. The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between MTR and retail prices. For this purpose, we can identify three kinds of arguments by reviewing the previous literatures. We empirically analyze the relationship with latest European data and Korean annual data. Furthermore, we also examine whether the relationship would depend on the competition structure. The results imply that decreasing MTR would result in reduction of the retail prices but the effect would be enhanced by improvement of market concentration. †