Revisiting IP QoS: why do we care, what have we learned? ACM SIGCOMM 2003 RIPQOS workshop report
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
How many tiers?: pricing in the internet transit market
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2011 conference
Mining mobility data to minimise travellers' spending on public transport
Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
You're capped: understanding the effects of bandwidth caps on broadband use in the home
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Last call for the buffet: economics of cellular networks
Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Mobile computing & networking
3GOL: power-boosting ADSL using 3G onloading
Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
Hi-index | 0.00 |
The assumption of rationality is fundamental to large part of network economics literature. In this paper, we use a simple definition of rationality based on economic self-interest and test for such behavior using real data on how users purchase and consume mobile network services. If users acted in their best (optimal) interest, then they would opt for the tariff that best suits their demands. However, that need not be the case, as users can fall prey to biases that can lead them to make seemingly sub-optimal choices. Such biases are hard to characterize and in this paper we empirically study how end-users purchase and use network services. We find that most customers choose sub-optimal tariffs, and that median and mean overpayment is 26% and 37%, respectively, of the user optimal tariff bill. Additionally, we observe not only that perception of traffic usage biases the tariff choice but also that the choice of tariff biases traffic usage: the traffic demand grows substantially when users switch from pay-as-you-go to a bundle tariff, and that traffic demand on a bundle is not uniformly spread across time.