Multi-Homing Revisited: Level of Adoption and Competitive Strategies
Authors: Barua, Anitesh; Mukherjee, Rajiv
Journal: MIS Quarterly (2021)
<jats:p>Aided by the increasing ease of use, lower adoption cost, and higher network benefits, consumers are demonstrating a strong propensity to concurrently use competing firms’ products or services. Depending on their relative preference for a firm, such “multi-homing” consumers may adopt each firm partially and therefore contribute to the network benefits of no firm fully, as would be the case with single-homing. Consumers’ level of adoption of competing products is a key feature of multi-homing, which, while observed widely in practice, has not previously been studied in the literature. Through a series of analytical models, we demonstrate the important role of this construct in the pricing and capability-related decisions of competing firms. Our results provide several new insights, which suggest that as multi-homing (M) settings become common across industries, technology strategists and managers should exercise caution against simply extrapolating insights from single-homing (S) settings, where consumers adopt only one firm, or from M settings, where the level of adoption is not accounted for. Specifically, in markets where competing products are not well differentiated, c…