2,383 research outputs found
Uncertain Price Competition in a Duopoly with Heterogeneous Availability
We study the price competition in a duopoly with an arbitrary number of
buyers. Each seller can offer multiple units of a commodity depending on the
availability of the commodity which is random and may be different for
different sellers. Sellers seek to select a price that will be attractive to
the buyers and also fetch adequate profits. The selection will in general
depend on the number of units available with the seller and also that of its
competitor - the seller may only know the statistics of the latter. The setting
captures a secondary spectrum access network, a non-neutral Internet, or a
microgrid network in which unused spectrum bands, resources of ISPs, and excess
power units constitute the respective commodities of sale. We analyze this
price competition as a game, and identify a set of necessary and sufficient
properties for the Nash Equilibrium (NE). The properties reveal that sellers
randomize their price using probability distributions whose support sets are
mutually disjoint and in decreasing order of the number of availability. We
prove the uniqueness of a symmetric NE in a symmetric market, and explicitly
compute the price distribution in the symmetric NE.Comment: 45 pages, Accepted for publication in IEEE Transaction on Automatic
Contro
Quality Sensitive Price Competition in Spectrum Oligopoly:Part 1
We investigate a spectrum oligopoly market where primaries lease their
channels to secondaries in lieu of financial remuneration. Transmission quality
of a channel evolves randomly. Each primary has to select the price it would
quote without knowing the transmission qualities of its competitors' channels.
Each secondary buys a channel depending on the price and the transmission
quality a channel offers. We formulate the price selection problem as a non
co-operative game with primaries as players. In the one-shot game, we show that
there exists a unique symmetric Nash Equilibrium(NE) strategy profile and
explicitly compute it. Our analysis reveals that under the NE strategy profile
a primary prices its channel to render high quality channel more preferable to
the secondary; this negates the popular belief that prices ought to be selected
to render channels equally preferable to the secondary regardless of their
qualities. We show the loss of revenue in the asymptotic limit due to the non
co-operation of primaries. In the repeated version of the game, we characterize
a subgame perfect NE where a primary can attain a payoff arbitrarily close to
the payoff it would obtain when primaries co-operate.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. 41
pages single column format.Conference version is available at arXiv:1305.335
The impact of bundling licensed and unlicensed wireless service
Unlicensed spectrum has been viewed as a way to increase competition in
wireless access and promote innovation in new technologies and business models.
However, several recent papers have shown that the openness of such spectrum
can also lead to it becoming over congested when used by competing wireless
service providers (SPs). This in turn can result in the SPs making no profit
and may deter them from entering the market. However, this prior work assumes
that unlicensed access is a separate service from any service offered using
licensed spectrum. Here, we instead consider the more common case were service
providers bundle both licensed and unlicensed spectrum as a single service and
offer this with a single price. We analyze a model for such a market and show
that in this case SPs are able to gain higher profit than the case without
bundling. It is also possible to get higher social welfare with bundling.
Moreover, we explore the case where SPs are allowed to manage the customers'
average percentage of time they receive service on unlicensed spectrum and
characterize the social welfare gap between the profit maximizing and social
welfare maximizing setting.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, accepted and to appear at IEEE International
Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 201
Multilevel Pricing Schemes in a Deregulated Wireless Network Market
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 power-based 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 game-theoretical 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.Comment: This is the last draft version of the paper. Revised version of the
paper accepted by ValueTools 2013 can be found in Proceedings of the 7th
International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools
(ValueTools '13), December 10-12, 2013, Turin, Ital
Competition in Wireless Systems via Bayesian Interference Games
We study competition between wireless devices with incomplete information
about their opponents. We model such interactions as Bayesian interference
games. Each wireless device selects a power profile over the entire available
bandwidth to maximize its data rate. Such competitive models represent
situations in which several wireless devices share spectrum without any central
authority or coordinated protocol.
In contrast to games where devices have complete information about their
opponents, we consider scenarios where the devices are unaware of the
interference they cause to other devices. Such games, which are modeled as
Bayesian games, can exhibit significantly different equilibria. We first
consider a simple scenario of simultaneous move games, where we show that the
unique Bayes-Nash equilibrium is where both devices spread their power equally
across the entire bandwidth. We then extend this model to a two-tiered spectrum
sharing case where users act sequentially. Here one of the devices, called the
primary user, is the owner of the spectrum and it selects its power profile
first. The second device (called the secondary user) then responds by choosing
a power profile to maximize its Shannon capacity. In such sequential move
games, we show that there exist equilibria in which the primary user obtains a
higher data rate by using only a part of the bandwidth.
In a repeated Bayesian interference game, we show the existence of reputation
effects: an informed primary user can bluff to prevent spectrum usage by a
secondary user who suffers from lack of information about the channel gains.
The resulting equilibrium can be highly inefficient, suggesting that
competitive spectrum sharing is highly suboptimal.Comment: 30 pages, 3 figure
Quality Sensitive Price Competition in Spectrum Oligopoly
We investigate a spectrum oligopoly where primary users allow secondary
access in lieu of financial remuneration. Transmission qualities of the
licensed bands fluctuate randomly. Each primary needs to select the price of
its channel with the knowledge of its own channel state but not that of its
competitors. Secondaries choose among the channels available on sale based on
their states and prices. We formulate the price selection as a non-cooperative
game and prove that a symmetric Nash equilibrium (NE) strategy profile exists
uniquely. We explicitly compute this strategy profile and analytically and
numerically evaluate its efficiency. Our structural results provide certain key
insights about the unique symmetric NE.Comment: Presented in ISIT' 2013, Istanbul Version 2 contains some modified
versions of proofs of version 1. In IEEE Proceedings of International
Symposium on Information Theory, 201
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