A Game-Theoretic Approach for Pricing and Determining Quality Levels of Cybersecurity Products Under an Exogenous Information-Sharing Program

Abstract

Price and quality level of products are two important decisions of any business. This paper provides equilibrium solutions for these decisions of two players for a cybersecurity ecosystem, including a solution provider and an information provider. We assume that end users join a cybersecurity ecosystem based on the prices and qualities of the solution provider’s and information provider’s products; so that, the increasing of the prices or/and decreasing the qualities will reduce the number of end-users of that ecosystem. Also, it is assumed that there is an exogenous information-sharing program under which the effect of quality of the information provider’s product on the cybersecurity level depends on the level of information-sharing. Under this information-sharing program, the equilibrium solutions of prices and qualities of these two players are given. Also, some results and insights are given with a numerical example.