Does Congestion Always Hurt? Managing Discount Under Congestion in a Game-Theoretic Setting

Many firms buy cloud services from cloud vendors, such as Amazon Web Services to serve end users. One of the key factors that affect the quality of cloud services is congestion. Congestion leads to a potential loss of end users, resulting in lower demand for cloud services. Although discount can stimulate demand, its effect under congestion is ambiguous; a higher discount leads to higher demand, but it can further lead to higher congestion, thereby lowering demand. We explore how congestion moderates both cloud vendor pricing and the buyer’s fulfillment decisions. We seek to answer how the congestion sensitivity of the end users and the cost of technology impact buyer profitability and the cloud vendor’s choice of discount. We also examine how the cost of technology determines the buyer’s willingness to pass on savings to end users. Our results show that the buyer is not necessarily worse off even when the end users are more intolerant to congestion. In fact, when end users are more congestion sensitive, the demand for cloud services can sometimes increase, and the discount offered by the vendor can decrease. We also observe that a lower cost of technology can sometimes hurt the buyer, and the buyer can pass on lower benefits to end users.