A Non-cooperative Game-Theoretic Framework for Sponsoring Content in the Internet Market

Abstract

With a sponsored content plan on the internet market, a content provider (CP) can pay to the internet service providers (ISP) on behalf of the mobile users/subscribers to remove the network subscription fees for introduce an increase in the number of advertisements. As such, CP, ISP and end-users are all actively motivated to participate in the sponsored content plan. In this paper, we investigate the interactions between CPs as a non-cooperative game as a function of two market parameters credibility of content and number of sponsored content. In turn, the subscribers’ demand for the content of a CP depends not only on their strategies but also upon those proposed by all of its competitors. Through rigorous mathematical analysis, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium. Based on the analysis of the game properties, we propose an iterative algorithm, which guarantees to converge to the Nash equilibrium point in a distributed manner. Numerical investigation shows the convergence of a proposed algorithm to the Nash equilibrium point and corroborates the fact that sponsoring content may improve the CPs outcome.