Analysis of membership sharing problem in digital subscription services

Abstract

A common problem to current digital subscription services is how to prevent membership (e.g. account and password) sharing beyond authorised consumers. Unlike traditional subscription services such as wired phone examples, sharing is much more popular in a digital world due to the access of information goods is typically portable and the identifications can be easily transferred. In this article, we first present a formal game-theoretic analysis of the sharing problem, and then propose an incentives-based secrets protection system (IBSPS) so as to encourage consumers to keep their memberships private rather than to share them among friends. The analysis on user's behaviour and producer's revenue management with IBSPS is presented so as to achieve a win-win game between them. Finally, a proposal on conjoint analysis of user behaviours is presented to further verify the effectiveness and efficiency hypotheses of IBSPS.DRM; digital rights management; e-commerce; electronic commerce; game theory; revenue management; membership sharing; digital subscription services; authorisation; incentives-based secrets protection; security; privacy; user behaviour.