Internet pricing with a game theoretical approach: concepts and examples
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
IEEE Micro
The antecedents of consumers' loyalty toward internet service providers
Information and Management
ICQT '09 Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Internet Charging and Qos Technologies: Network Economics for Next Generation Networks
Revisiting internet access pricing for loyal customers: the long-term interaction case
NGI'09 Proceedings of the 5th Euro-NGI conference on Next Generation Internet networks
On economic heavy hitters: shapley value analysis of 95th-percentile pricing
IMC '10 Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
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In this paper we investigate the impact of customer loyalty on the price competition between local Internet Service Providers who sell Internet access to end-users. The main contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we develop a repeated game, and show how cooperation between ISPs resulting in higher profits can be enforced through a threat strategy in the presence of customer loyalty. Second, we investigate the case of a differentiated customer population by introducing dual reservation values, and show how it leads to new, pure strategy Nash equilibra for a wide range of demand functions. Third, we develop two novel models for customer loyalty, along with a simulation tool that is capable of demonstrating the impact of the novel models. We argue that our findings can bring us closer to the understanding of economic interactions among ISPs and, at the same time, can motivate researchers to incorporate a finer-grained user behavior model involving customer loyalty in their investigations of such interactions.