Game theoretic sponsored content management in mobile data market

Abstract

A sponsored content policy enables a content provider to pay a mobile network operator, and thereby mobile users can access contents from the content provider through network services from the network operator with lower charge. As a result, the content provider and users are both actively engaged into the sponsored content ecosystem. As such, a key challenge is how to provide proper sponsorship in the situation of complex tripartite interactions among the three entities, namely, the network operator, the content provider, and users. In this thesis, we mainly study the game-theoretic interactions among the three entities under the sponsored content policy.

In the first part of the thesis, we model the interactions as a hierarchical Stackelberg game, where the network operator and the content provider act as the leaders determining the pricing and sponsoring strategies, respectively, and the users act as the followers deciding on their content demand. The model incorporates the network effects in a social domain and congestion in a network domain which enables us to obtain more insights from the sponsored content policy. We adopt the matrix formulation to characterize the game equilibrium solution and leverage the theory of matrix to assist our analysis. Through backward induction, the existence and uniqueness of Stackelberg equilibrium are validated analytically.

In the second part of the thesis, we propose to tackle the challenge of the information asymmetry between the content provider and users using a Stackelberg game-based framework. In the framework, the network operator acts as the leader, and the content provider as well as users act as the followers. We model the interaction between the content provider and the users as a contract game in the presence of asymmetric information. In the contract game, the content provider designs a contract that contains its sponsorship strategies toward all types of users. We then derive the necessary and sufficient conditions of feasible contracts and obtain an optimal contract to maximize the profit of the content provider. Taking into account the optimal contract of contract game, we also investigate the optimal pricing of the network operator through backward induction.

Meanwhile, with the forthcoming of 5G, edge caching becomes a promising technology for traffic offloading and improve service quality of the contents. The key idea is that an edge caching content provider caches content on edge networks. The cached content is then delivered to users locally, reducing latency substantially. In the third part of the thesis, we propose the joint sponsored and edge caching content service market model. We investigate an interplay between the normal sponsored content provider and the edge caching content provider under the non-cooperative game framework. Furthermore, the interactions among the network operator, content providers and users are modeled as a hierarchical three-stage Stackelberg game. In the game model, we explore the sub-game perfect equilibrium in each stage systematically and analytically. The existence of the proposed Stackelberg equilibrium is validated by capitalizing on the bilevel optimization programming. Based on the analysis of the game properties, we propose a sub-gradient based iterative algorithm, which guarantees to converge to the Stackelberg equilibrium.

In summary, this thesis addresses a few urgent challenging problems with the tools of game theory in the real implementation of sponsored content. We also conduct extensive numerical simulations to illustrate some important properties of the equilibrium, and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed game models and sponsorship schemes in sponsored content. Finally, we outline several promising research directions for the future work.