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Conventionally, mobile network operators charge users for data plan subscriptions. To create new revenue streams, some operators now also incentivize users to watch ads with data rewards and collect payments from advertisers. In this work, we study two such rewarding schemes: a Subscription-Aware Rewarding (SAR) scheme and a Subscription-Unaware Rewarding (SUR) scheme. Under the SAR scheme, only the subscribers of the operators' existing data plans are eligible for the rewards; under the SUR scheme, all users are eligible for the rewards (e.g., the users who do not subscribe to the data plans can still get SIM cards and receive data rewards by watching ads). We model the interactions among a capacity-constrained operator, users, and advertisers by a two-stage Stackelberg game, and characterize their equilibrium strategies under both the SAR and SUR schemes. We show that the SAR scheme can lead to more subscriptions and a higher operator revenue from the data market, while the SUR scheme can lead to better ad viewership and a higher operator revenue from the ad market. We provide some counter-intuitive insights for the design of data rewards. For example, the operator's optimal choice between the two schemes is sensitive to the users' data consumption utility function. When each user has a logarithmic utility function, the operator should apply the SUR scheme (i.e., reward both subscribers and nonsubscribers) if and only if it has a small network capacity.
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This content will become publicly available on December 8, 2026
Does Dockless Bike-Sharing Create a Competition for Losers?
We model the oligopoly competition in a dockless bike-sharing (DLB) market as a bilevel game. Each DLB operator is first committed to an action tied to a specific objective, such as maximizing profit. Then, the operators play a lower-level game to achieve their individual goals and finally reach a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium by making tactic decisions (e.g., pricing and fleet sizing). We define a Nash equilibrium under either weak or strong preference to characterize the likely outcomes of the bilevel game and formulate the demand-supply equilibrium of a DLB market that accounts for key operational features and mode choice. Using the oligopoly game model calibrated with empirical data, we show that if an operator seeks to maximize its market share with a budget constraint, all other operators must either respond in kind or be driven out of the market. When all operators compete for market dominance, even a slight efficiency edge gained by one operator can significantly shift the outcome, which signals high volatility. Moreover, even if all operators agree to focus on making money rather than ruinously seeking dominance, profitability still plunges quickly with the number of operators. Taken together, the results explain why an unregulated DLB market is often oversupplied and prone to collapse under competition. We also show that this market failure may be prevented by a fleet cap regulation, which sets an upper limit on each operator’s fleet size. Funding: This research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Civil Infrastructure System (CIS) Program under the award CMMI no. 2225087. K. Zhang received financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation [Grant 219232]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2024.0846 .
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- Award ID(s):
- 2225087
- PAR ID:
- 10657477
- Publisher / Repository:
- INFORMS
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Transportation Science
- ISSN:
- 0041-1655
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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