Game Theory for Networks. 2nd International ICST Conference, GAMENETS 2011, Shanghai, China, April 16-18, 2011, Revised Selected Papers

Research Article

Joint Price and QoS Market Share Game with Adversarial Service Providers and Migrating Customers

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-30373-9_44,
        author={Mohamed Baslam and Loubna Echabbi and Rachid El-Azouzi and Essaid Sabir},
        title={Joint Price and QoS Market Share Game with Adversarial Service Providers and Migrating Customers},
        proceedings={Game Theory for Networks. 2nd International ICST Conference, GAMENETS 2011, Shanghai, China, April 16-18, 2011, Revised Selected Papers},
        proceedings_a={GAMENETS},
        year={2012},
        month={10},
        keywords={Price QoS Behaviours of customers Competition Migration customers Nash equilibrium},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-642-30373-9_44}
    }
    
  • Mohamed Baslam
    Loubna Echabbi
    Rachid El-Azouzi
    Essaid Sabir
    Year: 2012
    Joint Price and QoS Market Share Game with Adversarial Service Providers and Migrating Customers
    GAMENETS
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-30373-9_44
Mohamed Baslam1, Loubna Echabbi2, Rachid El-Azouzi3, Essaid Sabir
  • 1: LIMIARF, University of Mohammed V-Agdal
  • 2: INPT, National Institute of Post and Telecommunication
  • 3: LIA/CERI, University of Avignon

Abstract

In order to attract more and more customers, the price war between service providers (SPs) is becoming increasingly fierce. This kind of conflict situations has been analyzed and hugely studied by a plenty of works in the related literature. However unfortunately, almost all prior works neglect an important decision parameter, it is the promised quality of service which can be a serious advantage to register to an operator rather than the others. In this paper, we formulate the interaction between service providers as a non-cooperative game. First, each SP chooses the Quality of Service (QoS) to guarantee (it depends on the amount of requested bandwidth) and the corresponding price. Second, the customers decide to which SP to subscribe defining the market share for each SP. Then, each customers may migrate/churn to another SP or alternatively switch to “no subscription state” depending on the observed price/QoS. Furthermore, we build a Markovian model to derive the behaviour of customers depending on the strategic actions of the SPs. Finally, we provide extensive numerical examples to show the importance of taking price and QoS as a joint decision parameters and provide thereby some insights/heuristic on how to set them.