1 Mobile Service Platform Competition Shahrokh Nikou

Mobile service platforms are becoming particularly important as play a significant role in consumers’ decisions to accept, adopt and use mobile services and applications. Literature on mobile service platforms focuses mainly on strategic issues in managing multi-sided platforms and economic issues of two sided markets, still literature is highly conceptual and empirical research on the awareness and preferences of consumers is lacking. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research on platforms developed by mobile network operators. By making use of conjoint analysis, 62 Finnish respondents participated in an empirical study. The conjoint analysis results show that application costs and type of operating system are the most important criteria to make a decision and the provider of the service platform is not of the concern. However, consumers value issues such as security and privacy arrangement which are often guaranteed by network operators. Our findings have three suggestions to mobile network operators: (1), they settle for becoming a bit-pipe provider, (2), open their platforms, and (3), let other market competitors such as Apple, Google, Facebook be responsible for providing mobile services and applications.