Understand Love of Variety in Wireless Data Market under Sponsored Data Plans

Sponsored Data Plan (SDP) is an emerging pricing model for the wireless data market where the Content Provider (CP) can sponsor the data usage for specific content on behalf of the users. This strategy sheds new light on the data pricing model and receives significant attention from the Internet Service Provider (ISP). However, the existing SDP studies consider traffic price (e.g., sponsorship) as the only factor that affects user decision. The impact of other classic market features, such as the demand for a variety of contents (i.e., love of variety), remains largely unclear. In this paper, we develop a new model to understand the love of variety in the wireless data market under SDPs. Our model has demonstrated that, such variety is important to understand the complex gaming between ISPs, CPs, and users in both short-run and long-run markets. For example, the analysis indicates that the advantage of CPs with higher revenue will be significantly reduced when users have a greater love of variety. Moreover, to help the ISP better adopt the proposed model in the real market, we also develop a practical method to calibrate the related parameters, which can also be applied to quantity the love of variety.