Church and King (1993) develops a model of bilingualism, in which they talk about multihoming in language networks. Doganoglu and Wright (2006) talks of multihoming in the presence of price competition. As per the literature available in the public domain, we have not come across any theoretical model to study multihoming behavior of users in social networking websites. The current study builds a theoretical model for competition between social networking websites. The first case considers competition between two social networking websites with multihoming and without product differentiation and the second case is for competition between two social networking websites with multihoming and product differentiation. The study tries to find out whether consumer utility from social networking websites is higher when there is multihoming without or with product differentiation. The study also tries to find out whether welfare is higher under conditions of multihoming with or without product differentiation.
['Monika Mital', 'Sumit Sarkar']
Multihoming behavior of users in social networking web sites: a theoretical model