Mobile data demand is increasing tremendously in wireless social networks, and thus an efficient pricing scheme for social-enabled services is urgently needed. Though static pricing is dominant in the actual data market, price intuitively ought to be dynamically changed to yield greater revenue. The critical question is how to design the optimal dynamic pricing scheme, with prospects for maximizing the expected long-term revenue. In this paper, we study the sequential dynamic pricing scheme of a monopoly mobile network operator in the social data market. In the market, the operator, i.e., the seller, individually offers each mobile user, i.e., the buyer, a certain price in multiple time periods sequentially and repeatedly. The proposed scheme exploits the network effects in the mobile users’ behaviors that boost the social data demand. Furthermore, due to limited radio resource, the impact of wireless network congestion is taken into account in the pricing scheme. Thereafter, we propose a modified sequential pricing policy in order to ensure social fairness among mobile users in terms of their individual utilities. To gain more insights, we further study a simultaneous dynamic pricing scheme in which the operator offers the data price simultaneously. We analytically demonstrate that the proposed dynamic pricing scheme can help the operator gain greater revenue and users achieve higher total utilities than those of the baseline static pricing scheme. We construct the social graph using Erdős-Rényi (ER) model and the real dataset based social network for performance evaluation. The numerical results corroborate that the dynamics of pricing schemes over static ones can significantly improve the revenue of the operator.

中文翻译：

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具有网络效应的移动社交数据市场收入最大化的动态定价

无线社交网络中的移动数据需求急剧增加，因此迫切需要一种有效的社交服务定价方案。尽管静态定价在实际数据市场中占主导地位，但直觉上应该动态更改价格以产生更大的收入。关键问题是如何设计最优的动态定价方案，并具有最大化预期长期收入的前景。在本文中，我们研究了社交数据市场中一家垄断移动网络运营商的顺序动态定价方案。在市场上，运营商，即卖方，在多个时间段内，依次重复地向每个移动用户，即买方，单独提供一定的价格。所提出的方案利用移动用户行为中的网络效应来促进社交数据需求。此外，由于无线电资源有限，在定价方案中考虑了无线网络拥塞的影响。此后，我们提出了修改后的顺序定价政策，以确保移动用户在个人效用方面的社会公平性。为了获得更多见解，我们进一步研究了同时动态定价方案，其中运营商同时提供数据价格。我们通过分析证明，与基线静态定价方案相比，所提出的动态定价方案可以帮助运营商获得更大的收入和用户实现更高的总效用。我们使用 Erdős-Rényi (ER) 模型和基于真实数据集的社交网络构建社交图以进行性能评估。