Traditional regulatory methods for spectrum licensing have been recently identified as one of the causes for the under-utilization of the valuable radio spectrum. Governmental agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking ways to remove stringent regulatory barriers and facilitate broader access to the spectrum resources. The goal is to allow for an improved and ubiquitous sharing of the precious radio spectrum between commercial service providers. In this paper, we propose a novel noncooperative game theoretic approach, to show how to foster more sharing of the radio spectrum via the use of regulatory power. We define a two stage game in which the government regulators move first, followed by the providers. The providers are incentivized by lower spectrum allocation fees from the regulators in return for proof-of-sharing. The providers are offered discounted spectrum bands, potentially at different locations, but will be asked to provide coverage to users that are not subscribed to them so as to maintain their subsidy incentives from the government. In a simplification of the model, analytical expressions for the providers' perfect equilibrium strategies are derived, and we argue for the existence of the government's part of a perfect equilibrium. Our analysis shows that through subsidization, the government can provide small service providers a fair chance to compete with the large providers, thereby avoiding monopolization in the market.
Even though subsidization is heavily employed in several markets, the wireless market has not seen much of its usage beyond a few, limited scenarios. The most known subsidization in a wireless market is the subsidization of the expensive phones to the users by the provider @cite_3 , in that the user pays the phone's cost over a locked, termed contract. Unlocking the contract term either requires return of the phone or payment of a significant fee.
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Unlike telephone operators, which pay termination fees to reach the users of another network, Internet Content Providers (CPs) do not pay the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of users they reach. While the consequent cross subsidization to CPs has nurtured content innovations at the edge of the Internet, it reduces the investment incentives for the access ISPs to expand capacity. As potential charges for terminating CPs' traffic are criticized under the net neutrality debate, we propose to allow CPs to voluntarily subsidize the usagebased fees induced by their content traffic for end-users. We model the regulated subsidization competition among CPs under a neutral network and show how deregulation of subsidization could increase an access ISP's utilization and revenue, strengthening its investment incentives. Although the competition might harm certain CPs, we find that the main cause comes from high access prices rather than the existence of subsidization. Our results suggest that subsidization competition will increase the competitiveness and welfare of the Internet content market; however, regulators might need to regulate access prices if the access ISP market is not competitive enough. We envision that subsidization competition could become a viable model for the future Internet. Social norm has it that people are expected to respond to mobile phone messages quickly. We investigate how attentive people really are and how timely they actually check and triage new messages throughout the day. By collecting more than 55,000 messages from 42 mobile phone users over the course of two weeks, we were able to predict people's attentiveness through their mobile phone usage with close to 80 accuracy. We found that people were attentive to messages 12.1 hours a day, i.e. 84.8 hours per week, and provide statistical evidence how very short people's inattentiveness lasts: in 75 of the cases mobile phone users return to their attentive state within 5 minutes. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of attentiveness throughout each hour of the day and show that intelligent notification delivery services, such as bounded deferral, can assume that inattentiveness will be rare and subside quickly. Pricing content-providers for connectivity to end- users and setting connection parameters based on the price is an evolving model on the Internet. The implications are heavily debated in telecom policy circles, and some advocates of "Network Neutrality" have opposed price based differentiation in connectivity. However, pricing content providers can possibly subsidize the end-user's cost of connectivity, and the consequent increase in end-user demand can benefit ISPs and content providers. This paper provides a framework to quantify the precise trade-off in the distribution of benefits among ISPs, content-providers, and end-users. The framework generalizes the well-known utility maximization based rate allocation model, which has been extensively studied as an interplay between the ISP and the end-users, to incorporate pricing of content-providers. We derive the resulting equilibrium prices and data rates in two different ISP market conditions: competition and monopoly. Network neutrality based restriction on content-provider pricing is then modeled as a constraint on the maximum price that can be charged to content-providers. We demonstrate that, in addition to gains in total and end- user surplus, content-provider experiences a net surplus from participation in rate allocation under low cost of connectivity. The surplus gains are, however, limited under monopoly conditions in comparison to competition in the ISP market. The interaction of a content provider with end users on an infrastructure platform built and maintained by a service provider can be viewed as a two-sided market. Content sponsoring, i.e., charging the content provider instead of viewers for resources consumed in viewing the content, can benefit all parties involved. Without being charged directly or having it counted against their monthly data quotas, end users will view more content, allowing the content provider to generate more advertising revenue, extracted by the service provider to subsidize its investment and operation of the network infrastructure. However, realizing such gains requires a proper contractual relationship between the service provider and content provider. We consider the determination of this contract through a Stackelberg game. The service provider sets a pricing schedule for sponsoring and the content provider responds by deciding how much content to sponsor. We analyze the best strategies for the content provider and service provider in the event that the underlying demand for the content is uncertain. Two separate settings are defined. In the first, end users can be charged for non-sponsored views on a per-byte basis. In the second we extend the model to the more common case in which end users purchase data quotas on a periodic basis. Our main conclusion is that a coordinating contract can be designed that maximizes total system profit. Moreover, the additional profit due to sponsoring can be split between the content provider and service provider in an arbitrary manner.