  In sponsored content and service markets, the content and service providers
are able to subsidize their target mobile users through directly paying the
mobile network operator, to lower the price of the data/service access charged
by the network operator to the mobile users. The sponsoring mechanism leads to
a surge in mobile data and service demand, which in return compensates for the
sponsoring cost and benefits the content/service providers. In this paper, we
study the interactions among the three parties in the market, namely, the
mobile users, the content/service providers and the network operator, as a
two-level game with multiple Stackelberg (i.e., leader) players. Our study is
featured by the consideration of global network effects owning to consumers'
grouping. Since the mobile users may have bounded rationality, we model the
service-selection process among them as an evolutionary-population follower
sub-game. Meanwhile, we model the pricing-then-sponsoring process between the
content/service providers and the network operator as a non-cooperative
equilibrium searching problem. By investigating the structure of the proposed
game, we reveal a few important properties regarding the equilibrium existence,
and propose a distributed, projection-based algorithm for iterative equilibrium
searching. Simulation results validate the convergence of the proposed
algorithm, and demonstrate how sponsoring helps improve both the providers'
profits and the users' experience.
