Competition and Cooperation Analysis for Data Sponsored Market: A Network Effects Model

The data sponsored scheme allows the content provider to cover parts of the cellular data costs for mobile users. Thus the content service becomes appealing to more users and potentially generates more profit gain to the content provider. In this paper, we consider a sponsored data market with a monopoly network service provider, a single content provider, and multiple users. In particular, we model the interactions of three entities as a two-stage Stackelberg game, where the service provider and content provider act as the leaders determining the pricing and sponsoring strategies, respectively, in the first stage, and the users act as the followers deciding on their data demand in the second stage. We investigate the mutual interaction of the service provider and content provider in two cases: (i) competitive case, where the content provider and service provider optimize their strategies separately and competitively, each aiming at maximizing the profit and revenue, respectively; and (ii) cooperative case, where the two providers jointly optimize their strategies, with the purpose of maximizing their aggregate profits. We analyze the sub-game perfect equilibrium in both cases. Via extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the network effects significantly improve the payoff of three entities in this market, i.e., utilities of users, the profit of content provider and the revenue of service provider. In addition, it is revealed that the cooperation between the two providers is the best choice for all three entities.