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 .