Smart for whom? Cost ambiguity as corporate strategy in the 21st century telco sector
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to expose techniques that telco vendors use for maximising revenue from their clients. Although the five-point strategy unearthed was based on the Canadian telco industry, it is interpreted as generic to the digital-age. Design/methodology/approach – Findings are based on focus groups with telco vendors and client perception data. Inductive reasoning is used to generalise findings to other distinctively digital-age industries. Findings – This paper finds five generic techniques that are used within the Canadian telecommunications (telco) industry to ensure that customers cannot control the cost of a smartphone. These techniques are described as an array of telco hybrid offerings, each with its own cost-structure and pricing strategy; the underestimation problem; devices are not geostationary; third-party agreements; and death-by-a-thousand-qualifications. Research limitations/implications – The research develops theory about modularity and platform technologies. Practical implications – Findings and insights have implications for strengthening consumer protection arrangements in the teleco industry, as well as other distinctively digital-age industries. Originality/value – This paper elaborates theory (particularly with respect to platform technologies and modularity). It interprets the flexibility that comes with modern technology as having a specific downside for consumers, namely, the removal of their capacity to control cost. As far as the authors have been able to ascertain, such an interpretation has not hitherto been presented. It is hoped that the classification of findings will become something of a public policy template for ensuring consumer protection.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it