Abstract
Content providers (CPs) may be faced with the question of how to choose in what content to specialize. We consider several CPs that are faced with a similar problem and study the impact of their decisions on each other using a game theoretic approach. As the number of content providers in a group specializing in a particular content increases, the revenue per content provider in the group decreases. The function that relates the number of CPs in a group to the revenue of each member may vary from one content to another. We show that the problem of selecting the content type is equivalent to a congestion game. This implies that (i) an equilibrium exists within pure policies, (ii) the game has a potential so that any local optimum of the potential function is an equilibrium of the original problem. The game is thus reduced to an optimization problem. (iii) Sequences of optimal responses of players converge to within finitely many steps to an equilibrium. We finally extend this problem to that of user specific costs in which case a potential need not exist any more. Using results from crowding games, we provide conditions for which sequences of best responses still converge to a pure equilibrium within finitely many steps.
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Altman, E. (2012). In Which Content to Specialize? A Game Theoretic Analysis. In: Becvar, Z., Bestak, R., Kencl, L. (eds) NETWORKING 2012 Workshops. NETWORKING 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7291. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30039-4_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30039-4_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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