Bandwidth-based Nonlinear Pricing on a Shared Link
Moon-Kyo Cho, Myeong-Cheol Park, Munkee Choi · 2007
Pricing a network service aims for congestion control of the network as well as economic efficiency. A monopolistic supplier providing users with a network service on a shared link needs a pricing schedule that maximizes revenue under the link's bandwidth constraint and guarantees the bandwidth purchased by the users. In that case, nonlinear pricing is an efficient scheme which meets both requirements. This study reviews how nonlinear pricing can be applied to the network service under the constraint and shows that the nonlinear pricing may result in a fixed unit price of bandwidth as linear pricing when demand characteristics of the users follow a power law. Also, the way how the provider with incomplete information on the demand distribution seeks for the optimal pricing from the degree of the network congestion is introduced and the relationship between the development direction of the Internet and internet pricing is considered based on the results of the study.