Cell phone roulette and “consumer interactive” quality

Under current policies, cell phone consumers face a lower probability of finding the best carrier for their usage patterns than winning at roulette. Corroborating survey data consistently show significant dissatisfaction among cell phone users, network performance is a major issue, and customer “churn” is high. This problem may be traced to a new form of “consumer interactive” quality characteristic of emergent high technology products such as cell phone and broadband services. This problem is unlikely to be resolved by effective search and sampling, efficient secondary markets, or voluntary carrier disclosure. Traditional one-dimensional disclosure responses to this new variation on an old asymmetric information problem should give way to a more multi-faceted and fine-grained policy approach. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management