Optimal Management of Digital Content on Tiered Infrastructure Platforms
Authors: Du, Anna Ye; Das, Sanjukta; Gopal, Ram D.; Ramesh, Ram
Journal: Information Systems Research (2014)
<jats:p> Media firms are increasingly using tiered infrastructure to cost-effectively manage heterogeneous resources by strategically allocating digital content across multiple tiers to avoid overcapacitating high-performance, expensive infrastructure tiers. Complex migrations in tiered environments are currently possible in a seamless, nondisruptive manner. We model digital content as a network capturing the inter-item impacts and use this network structure to develop optimal migration policies that partition media content into tiers. Addressing the context of large content providers such as video-on-demand providers that employ infrastructure platforms for content storage and delivery, we develop a bilevel programming model to maximize the profits of a price-setting platform and a tiered allocation-setting content provider. We model two fundamental effects with digital content: a revenue effect emanating from the tiered architecture and a traffic generating effect among media objects. Using a detailed longitudinal simulation study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed provisioning policy and pricing strategy and illustrate the existence and impact of these effects in…