Economics of Age of Information Management under Network Externalities

Online content platforms are concerned about the freshness of their content updates to their end customers, and increasingly more platforms now invite and pay the crowd to share real-time information (e.g., news and sensor data) to help reduce their ages of information (AoI). How much crowdsourced data to sample and buy over time is a critical question for a platform's AoI management, requiring a good balance between its AoI and the incurred sampling cost. This question becomes more interesting by considering the stage after sampling, where two platforms coexist in sharing the content delivery network of limited bandwidth, and one platform's update may jam or preempt the other's under negative network externalities. When the two selfish platforms know each other's sampling costs, we formulate their interaction as a non-cooperative game and show both want to over-sample to reduce their own AoI, causing the price of anarchy (PoA) to be infinity. To remedy this huge efficiency loss, we propose a non-monetary trigger mechanism of punishment in a repeated game to enforce the platforms' cooperation to achieve the social optimum. We also study the more challenging incomplete information scenario that platform 1 knows more information about sampling cost than platform 2 by hiding its sampling cost information in the Bayesian game. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that even platform 1 may get hurt by knowing more information. We successfully redesign the trigger-and-punishment mechanism to negate platform 1's information advantage and ensure no cheating. As compared to the social optimum, extensive simulations show that the mechanisms can remedy the huge efficiency loss due to platform competition in different information scenarios.