Dr Michael Mei Xiaowei, a member of the Department of Management and Marketing, has secured a Research Grants Council (RGC) grant for his research.

His 24-month project, entitled “Economic Analysis of Sponsored Data through Incentivized Advertising – a Two-sided Market Perspective”, will involve him as the principal investigator. He was awarded a 2021–2022 grant to conduct this research under the Early Career Scheme (ECS), which aims to nurture junior academics and prepare them for a career in education and research.

The implementation of 5G networks is leading to an enormous increase in the amount of online content, which is forcing consumers to either decrease their consumption of mobile data or to purchase expensive data plans with higher quotas. To stimulate consumers to use more data, Internet service providers (ISPs) are investigating new business models that encourage content providers (CPs) to subsidize consumers’ mobile data. To be compensated by CPs, consumers are obliged to opt-in incentivized value-exchange advertising that requires them to perform some type of task, such as watching a video or filling out a questionnaire. This new business model facilitates value exchange between ISPs, CPs, marketing practitioners, and consumers, by turning mobile data into a digital currency, such that the entire mobile ecosystem operates on an entirely new mobile-engagement platform. This study investigates this innovative business model using a game theoretical framework incorporating both sides of the market: on one side, marketing practitioners deploy incentivized advertisements on CP’s platform, and on the other side, consumers are heterogeneous in the intrinsic valuation they derive from the consumption of CP’s premium content. In particular, this study aims to investigate the optimal strategies for the CP and ISP in a mobile ecosystem, and to provide practical guidelines for marketing practitioners to use when deploying incentivized advertisements on CP’s platform. The results of this study will also provide managerial insights for policymakers to regulate the telecommunications market and enhance consumer welfare, which is a critical issue in the 5G era.