{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,2]],"date-time":"2026-07-02T03:56:16Z","timestamp":1782964576758,"version":"3.54.5"},"reference-count":32,"publisher":"MIS Quarterly","issue":"2","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2021,6,1]]},"abstract":"<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\u2019 products or services. Depending on their relative preference for a firm, such \u201cmulti-homing\u201d 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\u2019 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, contrary to intuition, we find that under price competition, a firm\u2019s profit can be hurt by high levels of adoption by multi-homing consumers; further, in markets where prices are inflexible, a firm with a higher level of adoption can succeed even with a lower level of capability innovation relative to that of an S setting. In contrast to single-homing settings, we show that firms in M settings need to mitigate uncertainty regarding network benefits if the level of adoption is low. Finally, we explore the role of adoption level in two-sided markets and demonstrate that if one side does not have a strong preference for a platform, then, contrary to prevailing wisdom, the latter need not strongly subsidize the other side of the market.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.25300\/misq\/2021\/15416","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,8,20]],"date-time":"2021-08-20T16:05:08Z","timestamp":1629475508000},"page":"897-924","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.13003\/0pyd3js","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":29,"title":["Multi-Homing Revisited: Level of Adoption and Competitive Strategies"],"prefix":"10.25300","volume":"45","author":[{"given":"Anitesh","family":"Barua","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX, U.S.A."}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Rajiv","family":"Mukherjee","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Mays Business School, 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