A User-Influenced Pricing Mechanism for Internet Access

Proper pricing schemes are vital components to the continuing success of the Internet. In this paper, we propose a new pricing scheme for Internet access called user-influenced pricing. Our main contribution is threefold: first, we show how user-influenced pricing can provide the ISP with calculable revenues, while giving the users a chance to lower their costs via voting for their preferred pricing scheme. Second, we develop a cooperative weighted voting game which models the decision-making process, and we derive equilibrium solutions to analyze possible outcomes of the vote. Third, we investigate the distribution of power and we show that users with medium generated traffic volume are pivotal to the outcome. Finally, we discuss the practical feasibility of the proposed mechanism regarding user population, revenue planning and charging.

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