The Value of Sharing Intermittent Spectrum

Recent initiatives by regulatory agencies to increase spectrum resources available for broadband access include rules for sharing spectrum with high-priority incumbents. We study a model in which wireless Service Providers (SPs) charge for access to their own exclusive-use (licensed) band along with access to an additional shared band. The total, or delivered price in each band is the announced price plus a congestion cost, which depends on the load, or total users normalized by the bandwidth. The shared band is intermittently available with some probability, due to incumbent activity, and when unavailable, any traffic carried on that band must be shifted to licensed bands. The SPs then compete for quantity of users. We show that the value of the shared band depends on the relative sizes of the SPs: large SPs with more bandwidth are better able to absorb the variability caused by intermittency than smaller SPs. However, as the amount of shared spectrum increases, the large SPs may not make use of it. In that scenario shared spectrum creates more value than splitting it among the SPs for exclusive use. We also show that fixing the average amount of available shared bandwidth, increasing the reliability of the band is preferable to increasing the bandwidth

Equilibrium Characterization for Data Acquisition Games

We study a game between two firms in which each provide a service based on machine learning. The firms are presented with the opportunity to purchase a new corpus of data, which will allow them to potentially improve the quality of their products. The firms can decide whether or not they want to buy the data, as well as which learning model to build with that data. We demonstrate a reduction from this potentially complicated action space to a one-shot, two-action game in which each firm only decides whether or not to buy the data. The game admits several regimes which depend on the relative strength of the two firms at the outset and the price at which the data is being offered. We analyze the game's Nash equilibria in all parameter regimes and demonstrate that, in expectation, the outcome of the game is that the initially stronger firm's market position weakens whereas the initially weaker firm's market position becomes stronger. Finally, we consider the perspective of the users of the service and demonstrate that the expected outcome at equilibrium is not the one which maximizes the welfare of the consumers.Comment: The short version of this paper appears in the proceedings of IJCAI-1