A Truthful Pricing Mechanism for Sponsored Content in Wireless Networks

We study the problem faced by a wireless service provider (SP) when offering a ``sponsored content'' service to multiple content providers (CPs). Each CP specifies the value that they would obtain from additional content views together with estimates on the underlying demand for their content. The SP then determines which CPs should sponsor their content along with the price for doing so. This basic framework has been studied in a variety of different contexts in recent years. However, all of this previous work assumes that the CP parameters are reported truthfully to the SP. Another typical assumption is that the value that a CP places on a view is independent of the actions of other CPs, i.e. it does not explicitly capture the competition between CPs in similar markets. In this work we address both of these issues. We present a pricing scheme that optimizes SP profit subject to CPs being incentivized to report their parameters truthfully. We also examine how the model is affected if CPs in the same market are both vying to sponsor their content.