Upcoming Session
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
17h30
Presented by
Chuqing Jin (Toulouse School of Economics)
https://chuqingjin.github.io/

Sticky Consumers and Cloud Welfare

Abstract

The public cloud promises agility, yet we document significant customer inertia in a "best-case" scenario for switching: moving between products from the same provider, at the same data center, and within the same product series. Using proprietary customer-level data, we isolate a setting in which conventional switching frictions—such as migration fees and engineering costs—are minimal, allowing us to establish a lower bound on inertia in the public cloud market. Our findings suggest that this inertia is driven primarily by non-pecuniary organizational frictions rather than provider-imposed constraints; thus, even if regulators banned egress fees or standardized APIs, cloud customers would likely remain sticky. We develop and estimate a novel multiple discrete-continuous demand model to quantify this inertia. Surprisingly, we find that the cloud provider itself is also significantly harmed by this inertia, losing 58% of potential revenue as customers fail to adopt superior technologies that would drive usage expansion. While customers still derive substantial surplus from the cloud, inertia reduces total welfare by 62%.

About this workshop

The Digital Regulation workshop is an online seminar series focused on digital activities and their regulation.

This working group is developing a joint approach in order to establish a reasoned position on digital regulation in the context of current European (and American) initiatives. In particular, it is considering how to implement responsible governance while allowing for innovation. The issue of the effectiveness of public action and how it relates to competitiveness constraints is also central.

If you would like to present, attend, or have any question about seminar, please contact Damien Mayaux (damien.mayaux@dauphine.psl.eu) or Lucas Eustache (lucas.eustache@dauphine.psl.eu)

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