The Role of Responsive Pricing in the Internet

Jeffrey Mackie-Mason, Liam Murphy and John Murphy
Additional contact information
Liam Murphy: Auburn University
John Murphy: Dublin City University

Microeconomics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The Internet continues to evolve as it reaches out to a wider user population. The recent introduction of user-friendly navigation and retrieval tools for the World Wide Web has triggered an unprecedented level of interest in the Internet among the media and the general public, as well as in the technical community. It seems inevitable that some changes or additions are needed in the control mechanisms used to allocate usage of Internet resources. In this paper, we argue that a feedback signal in the form of a variable price for network service is a workable tool to aid network operators in controlling Internet traffic. We suggest that these prices should vary dynamically based on the current utilization of network resources. We show how this responsive pricing puts control of network service back where it belongs: with the users.

Keywords: Internet; pricing; feedback; networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D40 D61 L96 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 1996-06-03
Note: Type of Document - PDF; prepared on Windows; to print on Postscript; pages: 27; figures: Included. Forthcoming in _Internet Economics_, J. Bailey and L. McKnight, eds., MIT Press
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpmi:9606001

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