Pricing Sponsored Data Plans in Two-Sided Markets

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Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

School of Business | Master's thesis

Date

2018

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Economics

Language

en

Pages

63 + 4

Series

Abstract

This thesis shows that a monopoly Internet Service Provider will never offer zero-rated mobile data plans for homogenous consumers if it cannot ask content providers to pay for the traffic increase caused by to zero-rating. Increasing the data allowance will result in similar utility gains for the customers than zero-rating some content, with lower or identical costs for the Internet Service Provider. When a monopoly Internet Service Provider is allowed to collect payments from content providers, prices to both sides of the market are determined by the size of the data allowance. Opposing effects of distorted consumption towards the zero-rated content and increased total consumption of data mean that total welfare effects remain ambiguous and depend on the parameter values.

Description

Thesis advisor

Välimäki, Juuso
Mustonen, Mikko

Keywords

zero-rating, sponsored data, two-sided pricing, net neutrality

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