Mobile Termination and Consumer Expectations under the Receiver-Pays Regime

We analyze how termination charges affect retail prices when taking into account that receivers derive some utility from a call and when firms may charge consumers for receiving calls. A novel feature of our paper is that we consider passive self-fulfilling expectations and do not allow for negative reception charges. We reconfirm the finding of profit neutrality when firms cannot use termination-based price discrimination and show that connectivity is prone to breakdown.