Investment and Market Structure in Congestible Services
Ramesh Johari
Stanford University
Monday Sept. 25, 2006
4:00 PM, 5130 Upson
Abstract: We consider
investment and market structure in a model of congestion-sensitive service provision. Our starting
point is a simple model of network routing that has received a great deal of attention in the engineering
community, the so-called "selfish routing" model. A continuum of users wish to send data from source to
destination, and can choose from several parallel routes. Each route is owned by an independent network
provider that sets a price per unit flow along the route. A user's overall disutility is measured as the
sum of price and congestion experienced along the chosen route. In contrast to previous work, we consider
a model where providers can invest in their routes, to minimize the impact of this congestion externality.
We investigate this model through the Nash equilibria of the pricing and investment game played by providers.
We find that returns to investment and the timing of strategic decisions are critical determinants of the
outcome of the game. For a broad range of models for which (1) providers choose prices and investments
simultaneously, and (2) the model exhibits nonincreasing returns to investment, we show that if a pure strategy
Nash equilibrium exists, it is unique, symmetric, and efficient; we also establish conditions for existence of
pure strategy Nash equilibrium in special cases. This result does not hold if either (1) or (2) are violated,
and we discuss these scenarios as well. We also investigate several extensions, including modeling the entry
of providers into the market. We will emphasize the implications of our results for key issues in telecommunications,
including wireless Internet service penetration and the viability of source-directed routing.
This is joint work with Gabriel Weintraub and Ben Van Roy.