Economic Models of Sponsored Content in Wireless Networks with Uncertain Demand

This chapter evaluates an approach whereby the service provider can tap into an alternative source of revenue, originating from sales of advertisements or products and channelled by the content provider in the form of sponsorship of viewing. It presents a simple economic model in which service provider congestion costs, end user (EU) bandwidth costs, and the price that the content provider must pay for sponsoring content are all determined on a per-byte basis. A key feature of the model is that the content has uncertain demand. The chapter focuses on the relationship between the service provider and a single content provider. It also presents a numerical example to demonstrate how the optimization might work in practice. The chapter indicates how the results can be adapted for the case of EU quotas. In most current wireless data plans, the EUs pay a certain fee for a fixed quota of data.