Market entrance, user interaction and willingness-to-pay: Exploring fundamentals of QoE-based charging for VoD services

Strongly rising interest in Quality of Experience (QoE) research together with the current economical struggle of Network Service Providers (NSPs) are about to lead towards monetization of QoE overtaking outright quality optimization in importance. While there is still a significant lack of quantitative studies for backing QoE-based charging recommendations, the present work presents results and conclusions from a recent empirical user study explicitly measuring the maximum willingness-to-pay of end users for High Definition (HD) Video on Demand (VoD) services. Beyond the observation of unexpectedly high expenditures by test subjects, we focus on phenomena with respect to market entrance pricing strategies, which may be explained by anchoring effects well-known in psychology. Thus, the present work provides valuable clues on how to approach VoD markets in an optimal and economically efficient way.