A Study On The Mechanism Of Mobile Number Portability’s Effects On Customer Loyalty

Mobile number portability (MNP) is a popular regulation policy in telecommunication market which has been taken by 67 nations and areas. With the formal insurance of 3G licenses and the restruncting of telecom industry, the era of full-service competition in telecommunication market has come. In order to break the monopoly of dominant carrier and rebalance the competition in the mobile telecommunication market, mobile number portability (MNP) policy has been taken in Tianjin municipality and Hainan province in November 2010,and it is likely to be taken in the whole country in the future.Previus studies focus on measuring the effectiveness of MNP’s introduction, the technical solutions of MNP and so on. But the mechanism on how MNP affects customer loyalty and leads to switching behavior is still unknown. It is the direction of the study that the mechanism of MNP’s effects on customer loyalty. Combining the theory of customer satisfaction, transfer cost theory, MNP’s effects on customer loyalty and so on, the study forms a model measuring the mechanism of MNP’s effects on customer loyalty.Considering MNP has been taken into practice in Tianjin municipality and Hainan province, the study chooses Beijing and Tianjin as comparison. MNP is identified by the city.Logistic regression is used to test the hypotheisis and the effectiveness of MNP.The findings indicate that procedure switching cost has significantly indirect effect on customer loyalty. And the moderate effects of MNP are not significant. It is probably the main reason that MNP has not reached its initial target.