Download This PaperIndividualized Pricing for a Cloud Provider Hosting Interactive Applications
33 Pages Posted: 26 Sep 2019
Date Written: February 9, 2019
Abstract
We consider a cloud provider which hosts interactive applications such as mobile apps and online games. Depending on the traffic of users for an application, the provider commits a subset of its resources (hardware capacity) to serve the application. The provider must choose a dynamic pricing mechanism to indirectly select the applications hosted and maximize revenue. We model the provider's pricing problem as a large-scale stochastic dynamic program. To approach this problem, we propose a tractable approach to enable decomposing the multi-dimensional stochastic dynamic program into single-dimensional subproblems. We then extend the proposed framework to define an individualized dynamic pricing mechanism for the cloud provider. We present novel upper bounds on the optimal revenue to evaluate the performance of our pricing mechanism. The computational results show that a contract-based model of selling interactive cloud services achieves significantly greater revenue than the prevalent alternative, and that our pricing scheme attains near-optimal revenue.
Keywords: Cloud Computing Services, Interactive Applications, Individualized Pricing, Approximate Dynamic Programming, Stochastic Dynamic Programming
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation