Analysis of Bargaining Game Policy in the Internet Content Distribution Chain

Abstract

This paper examines the economic utilities in a two-way market where content delivery network (CDN) providers charge content providers (CPs) for distribution of contents to end-users. The authors offer new models that involve CPs, CDN providers and end users and formulate interactions between CPs and CDN providers as a non-cooperative game after bargaining on some common decision parameters. After formulating the game and theoretically studying the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium, numerical analysis shows that negotiation is an exceptional solution to fight against the marginalization of the decision that can behave in CPs or CDNs. In terms of profit, the authors have shown that when the bargaining game exists the two actors share the gain and that allows them survival in the market.