Volume 20, Issue 3

In an influential paper, Choi and Kim (2010) established the invariance result that given a fixed network capacity, the average waiting times are identical regardless of net neutrality. In this paper, we argue that their result relies on the assumption that the distribution for content requests per end user is the same regardless of net neutrality. However, if the distribution is determined by the underlying utility maximization problem of users, users expect the contents they request to be transmitted faster if the contents have priority, implying that the request rate for prioritized contents is higher than the request rate for unprioritized contents under net neutrality. If the content request rates per user differ across the two regimes (net neutrality vs. no net neutrality), the invariance result may not be valid. We also discuss social welfare and the investment incentive of the Internet service provider in an extended model with variable content request rates.

Platforms choose between offering exclusive deals or uniform prices to content providers in a setting where content providers can multi-home or single-home. We find that platforms offer exclusive deals for sufficiently large or sufficiently small values of standalone benefits. For sufficiently large or small standalone benefits, there are relatively large or small proportion of multi-homers to single-homers, exclusive deals allow to extract more efficiently from the content provider type that is relatively large in the market. Hence, it becomes more lucrative to employ exclusive deals regardless of the pricing strategy chosen by rival platform. We find that for standalone benefits being sufficiently small, exclusive deals equilibrium is also the industry profit enhancing outcome. On the other hand, when standalone benefits are large, exclusive pricing deals equilibrium leads to a prisoner’s dilemma type of outcome.