A Price-Based Decision Policy to Mitigate the Tragedy of the Commons and Anti-Commons

In developing countries subsidies play an important role and are used in one way or another to extend the information and communication services to the information “have nots” through subsidized communication services. However, subsidies may have an impact on network resource utilization, quality of service and the amount of revenue generated. For example, subsidies may lead to low Quality of Service (QoS) and high resource utilization while in some instances unsubsidized services may lead to high quality of services and low utilization of resources. This see-saw effect may eventually lead to market failure and it may, now and then, destroy market efficiency. This phenomenon calls for a combined study, in which the relationship between subsidy, price, QoS and resource utilization is investigated. In this chapter, the impact of subsidies on quality of service and resource utilization in multitier communities is investigated. We try to find a middle ground between implementation of subsidy policy and its effects on QoS and resource utilization in a network.