On the profits of competing cloud service providers: A game theoretic approach

摘要

The main contributions of the paper are summarized as follows. We take an analytical approach in the sense that the quality of service and the price of service as well as the revenue, cost, and profit of a cloud service provider (CSP) can all be quantitatively available based on well established analytical models. We argue that the satisfaction of a customer includes two aspects, i.e., satisfaction on the price of service and satisfaction on the quality of service. We are able to derive a closed-form expression of the expected customer satisfaction of a CSP. We develop a non-cooperative game formulation for a competitive cloud computing market with competing CSPs. We discuss the market stability mechanism which creates interaction among the CSPs, give the best response of a CSP based on the other CSPs' strategies, mention the existence of the Nash equilibrium, and develop an algorithm to find the Nash equilibrium.