Duopoly Competition for Mobile Data Plans with Time Flexibility

Abstract

The growing competition drives the mobile network operators (MNOs) to explore adding time flexibility to the traditional data plan, which consists of a monthly subscription fee, a data cap, and a per-unit fee for exceeding the data cap. The rollover data plan, which allows the unused data of the previous month to be used in the current month, provides the subscribers with the time flexibility. In this paper, we formulate two MNOs' market competition as a three-stage game, where the MNOs decide their data mechanisms (traditional or rollover) in Stage I and the pricing strategies in Stage II, and then users make their subscription decisions in Stage III. Different from the monopoly market where an MNO always prefers the rollover mechanism over the traditional plan in terms of profit, MNOs may adopt different data mechanisms at an equilibrium. Specifically, the high-QoS MNO would gradually abandon the rollover mechanism as its QoS advantage diminishes. Meanwhile, the low-QoS MNO would progressively upgrade to the rollover mechanism. The numerical results show that the market competition significantly limits MNOs' profits, but both MNOs obtain higher profits with the possible choice of the rollover data plan.

Multi-Cap Optimization for Wireless Data Plans with Time Flexibility

“…For example, the rollover data plan offered by AT&T requires that the rollover data from the previous month should be consumed after the current monthly data cap [6], while China Mobile requires the other way around [7]. In our previous work [8], [9], we analyzed the MNO's optimal data plan with time flexibility under the single-cap scheme (without price discrimination) and found that the time flexibility can increase both the MNO's profit and users' payoff, hence improve the social welfare. This motivates us to ask the second key question in this paper.…”

“…Section 3 introduces the system model. Section 4 analyzes the contract feasibility [10]- [13] No No [8] [9][14]- [16] Yes No [17] No Yes (but limited) This Paper Yes Yes and Section 5 studies the contract optimality. In Section 6, we present the numerical results.…”

“…Different from our previous works in [8], [9], in this paper, we consider a more realistic asymmetric information scenario, i.e., the parameters θ and β are each user's private information that the MNO does not know precisely. As a result, we propose to use a contract-theoretic approach to cope with users' multi-dimensional private information and optimize the MNO's multi-cap data plans.…”

“…We follow [26] by using the k-means clustering method to partition the empirical data valuation θ into four clusters with mean values Θ = {16.2, 36.1, 61.9, 96.3}, and partition the empirical network substitutability β into four clusters with mean value B = {0.51, 0.71, 0.84, 0.95} 8 . Therefore, we consider a total of KM = 16 user types, 9 and the corresponding distribution extracted from empirical data is shown in Fig. 5.…”

A Novel Mobile Data Contract Design with Time Flexibility

“…Secondary data trading is not convenient for operation, since the consumer has to buy or sell every time when he is running out of data or has data left unused. The papers [16], [17], [18], [19], [20] are the pioneer works that study the rollover data plan. Zheng et al in [16] evaluated the benefits of rollover data for both SPs and users as well as identify the types of users who would upgrade to rollover data plans.…”