Effects of Pricing on Internet User Behavior

The INternet Demand EXperiment (INDEX) conducts experiments to measure demand for quality-di erentiated Internet access as a function of bandwidth, traÆc volume, applications, and pricing structure. This paper presents an overview of results based on aggregated data from ve pricing experiments. In these experiments, pricing is based either on time, volume, a combination of both, or a at-rate buy out option. Quality of Service (QoS) is di erentiated by varying bandwidth for incoming and outgoing traÆc. After describing the experimental design and characterizing our subject pool using demographic data, we examine the change in service usage by comparing the ve experiments in terms of traÆc generation, QoS selection, and expenditure.This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Cisco Systems, SBC Communications, the California State MICRO Program, Hewlett-Packard and the German Research Society, Berlin-Brandenburg Graduate School of Distributed Information Systems (DFG grant no. GRK 316)