Incentive Mechanisms for Internet Congestion Management: Fixed-Budget Rebate Versus Time-of-Day Pricing
Mobile data traffic has been steadily rising in the past years. This has generated a significant interest in the deployment of incentive mechanisms to reduce peak-time congestion. Typically, the design of these mechanisms requires information about user demand and sensitivity to prices. Such informa...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
2014
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/89046 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1554-015X |
| Summary: | Mobile data traffic has been steadily rising in the past years. This has generated a significant interest in the deployment of incentive mechanisms to reduce peak-time congestion. Typically, the design of these mechanisms requires information about user demand and sensitivity to prices. Such information is naturally imperfect. In this paper, we propose a fixed-budget rebate mechanism that gives each user a reward proportional to his percentage contribution to the aggregate reduction in peak-time demand. For comparison, we also study a time-of-day pricing mechanism that gives each user a fixed reward per unit reduction of his peak-time demand. To evaluate the two mechanisms, we introduce a game-theoretic model that captures the public good nature of decongestion. For each mechanism, we demonstrate that the socially optimal level of decongestion is achievable for a specific choice of the mechanism's parameter. We then investigate how imperfect information about user demand affects the mechanisms' effectiveness. From our results, the fixed-budget rebate pricing is more robust when the users' sensitivity to congestion is “sufficiently” convex. This feature of the fixed-budget rebate mechanism is attractive for many situations of interest and is driven by its closed-loop property, i.e., the unit reward decreases as the peak-time demand decreases. |
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