Its amazing how mobile phone use differs across countries. Four examples:
The photo is a typical street transaction in Cusco, Peru where vendors rent phones by the call, though the ones I saw had their handsets chained to themselves to make theft more difficult.
Meanwhile, the Economist suggests that Iraqis may love mobile more than “freedom”. It seems that people are paying bills by texting the serial numbers of phone cards to each other, turning phone credit into a form of currency and avoiding those risky trips to the bank.
Next up, an oldie but a goodie. When mobile phones were introduced in Kerala, India,
the adoption of mobile phones by fishermen and wholesalers was associated with a dramatic reduction in price dispersion, the complete elimination of waste, and near-perfect adherence to the Law of One Price. Both consumer and producer welfare increased.
And thanks to the nice people at QJE, there is a rare ungated complete paper here.
So what would you expect in the USA? A supersized multichoice combo according to this piece from the NY Times.
But for all the complexity, cellphones American-style do have a certain supersized logic. Americans spend more money each month on their wireless bills than people in any other country. But the money we spend buys a whole lot more talk time and text messages than it does elsewhere. On average, we effectively spend about 5 cents per minute of talk time and about a penny a text message, lower than anywhere else in the developed world.