Pricing and revenue sharing in secondary market of mobile internet access (original) (raw)

The Effect of WiFi Offloading on Pricing Wireless Services

2015

WiFi offloading has been recently proposed as a cost-effective solution for coming up against the unprecedented increase in the mobile data traffic volume. However, apart from reducing the operational costs of a network operator, WiFi offloading can be also promoted as an alternative low-cost access service for users with low willingness-to-pay. In this paper, we consider a monopolistic scenario of a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) offering LTE and WiFi access services and find the optimal pricing decisions. We further illustrate that the presence of reluctant users to switch to the WiFi service could increase the profits of the MVNO.

Pricing Wireless Access Services: The Effect of Offloading and Users ’ Bounded Rationality

2016

Abstract—Offloading through WiFi access networks has been recently proposed as a cost-effective solution for coming up against the unprecedented increase in the mobile data traffic volume. However, apart from reducing the operational costs of a network operator, WiFi access can be also promoted as an alternative low-cost service for users with low willingness-to-pay. In this paper, we consider a monopolistic scenario of a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) offering LTE and WiFi access services and make the optimal pricing decisions. We further show that the presence of reluctant users to switch to the WiFi service could increase the profits of the MVNO. I.

Multilevel Pricing Schemes in a Deregulated Wireless Network Market

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools, 2014

Typically the cost of a product, a good or a service has many components. Those components come from different complex steps in the supply chain of the product from sourcing to distribution. This economic point of view also takes place in the determination of goods and services in wireless networks. Indeed, before transmitting customer data, a network operator has to lease some frequency range from a spectrum owner and also has to establish agreements with electricity suppliers. The goal of this paper is to compare two pricing schemes, namely a powerbased and a flat rate, and give a possible explanation why flat rate pricing schemes are more common than power based pricing ones in a deregulated wireless market. We suggest a hierarchical gametheoretical model of a three level supply chain: the end users, the service provider and the spectrum owner. The end users intend to transmit data on a wireless network. The amount of traffic sent by the end users depends on the available frequency bandwidth as well as the price they have to pay for their transmission. A natural question arises for the service provider: how to design an efficient pricing scheme in order to maximize his profit. Moreover he has to take into account the lease charge he has to pay to the spectrum owner and how many frequency bandwidth to rent. The spectrum owner itself also looks for maximizing its profit and has to determine the lease price to the service provider. The equilibrium at each level of our supply chain model are established and several properties are investigated. In particular, in the case of a power-based pricing scheme, the service provider and the spectrum owner tend to share the gross provider profit. Whereas, considering the flat rate pricing scheme, if the end users are going to exploit the network intensively, then the tariffs of the suppliers (spectrum owner and service provider) explode. 1

Demand for and Pricing of Mobile Internet: Evidence from a Real-World Pricing Experiment

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

ABSTRACT I study a budget-constrained, private-valuation, sealed-bid sequential auction with two incompletely-informed, risk-neutral bidders in which the valuations and income may be non-monotonic functions of a bidder's type. Multiple equilibrium symmetric bidding functions may exist that differ in allocation, efficiency and revenue. The sequence of sale affects the competition for a good and therefore also affects revenue and the prices of each good in a systematic way that depends on the relationship among the valuations and incomes of bidders. The sequence of sale may affect prices and revenue even when the number of bidders is large relative to the number of goods. If a particular good, say [alpha], is allocated to a strong bidder independent of the sequence of sale, then auction revenue and the price of good [alpha] are higher when good [alpha] is sold first.

Internet pricing with a game theoretical approach: concepts and examples

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2002

The basic concepts of three branches of game theory, leader-follower, cooperative, and two-person nonzero sum games, are reviewed and applied to the study of the Internet pricing issue. In particular, we emphasize that the cooperative game (also called the bargaining problem) provides an overall picture for the issue. With a simple model for Internet quality of service (QoS), we demonstrate that the leader-follower game may lead to a solution that is not Pareto optimal and in some cases may be "unfair," and that the cooperative game may provide a better solution for both the Internet service provider (ISP) and the user. The practical implication of the results is that government regulation or arbitration may be helpful. The QoS model is also applied to study the competition between two ISPs, and we find a Nash equilibrium point from which the two ISPs would not move out without cooperation. The proposed approaches can be applied to other Internet pricing problems such as the Paris Metro pricing scheme.

Market models and pricing mechanisms in a multihop wireless hotspot network

2005

Abstract Multihop wireless hotspot network [A. Balachandran et al.,(2003), F. Fitzek et al.,(2003), YD. Lin et al.,(1999), KC. Wang et al.,(2003)] has been recently proposed to extend the coverage area of a base station. However, with selfish nodes in the network, multihop packet forwarding cannot take place without an incentive mechanism. In this paper, we adopt the" pay for service" incentive model, ie, clients pay the relaying nodes for their packet forwarding service.

Modeling Competition among Wireless Service Providers

Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces Series, 2006

We consider a scenario where a population of customers is spatially distributed in a region which is served by two wireless service providers that offer Internet Access via two noninterfering technologies: one having a uniform coverage over the region (e.g. WAN), and the other, a limited coverage (e.g. WiFi "hotspots"). We assume that customers are equipped with "dual mode" wireless communication devices that have the capability to select which among the available providers to use. We introduce a stochastic geometric model for the locations of customers and providers' access points and a utility-based mechanism modeling how devices select among providers. In particular, we assume that each device makes greedy decisions at random times, i.e., selects the available provider offering the highest utility at that time. We demonstrate that this process may have multiple equilibria, and prove that the system will almost surely evolve to one of the equilibrium configurations, starting from any initial configuration for users' choices. We also provide conditions under which the set of equilibria is relatively "tight"-in this case the equilibrium configuration of agents' choices is "maxmin fair" and thus is desirable if providers wish to cooperate in providing users with worst case performance guarantees. As an application of our framework we analyze the WAN and WiFi competition in an asymptotic scenario where the service zones of WAN provider are much larger than those of WiFi access providers.

Internet Economics: The Use of Shapley Value for ISP Settlement

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2010

Within the current Internet, autonomous ISPs implement bilateral agreements, with each ISP establishing agreements that suit its own local objective to maximize its profit. Peering agreements based on local views and bilateral settlements, while expedient, encourage selfish routing strategies and discriminatory interconnections. From a more global perspective, such settlements reduce aggregate profits, limit the stability of routes, and discourage potentially useful peering/connectivity arrangements, thereby unnecessarily balkanizing the Internet. We show that if the distribution of profits is enforced at a global level, then there exist profit-sharing mechanisms derived from the coalition games concept of Shapley value and its extensions that will encourage these selfish ISPs who seek to maximize their own profits to converge to a Nash equilibrium. We show that these profit-sharing schemes exhibit several fairness properties that support the argument that this distribution of profits is desirable. In addition, at the Nash equilibrium point, the routing and connecting/peering strategies maximize aggregate network profits and encourage ISP connectivity so as to limit balkanization.

Incentives and algorithms for broadband access sharing

Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Home networks - HomeNets '10, 2010

The unprecedented growth of the mobile (Smart)phone industry that comes together with the corresponding application development market has made apparent that mobile networking through 3G links is just about to reach an unbreakable limit, in terms of network capacity. The networking research community has recently started considering alternative connectivity approaches to support and boost the performance of mobile networking. In particular, researchers have identified a big amount of "power", hidden at the edges of the network, which remains there unexploited and is no other than the WiFi technology deployed in home-networks. We explore incentives and algorithms for Broadband Access Sharing to support nomadic users and show that ubiquitous connectivity in densely populated areas is already possible, since the infrastructure is already there, waiting to be used.