Pricing for Collaboration Between Online Apps and Offline Venues.

An increasing number of mobile applications (abbrev. apps), like Pokemon Go and Snapchat, reward the users who physically visit some locations tagged as POIs (places-of-interest) by the apps. We study the novel POI-based collaboration between apps and venues (e.g., restaurants). On the one hand, an app charges a venue and tags the venue as a POI. The POI tag motivates users to visit the venue, which potentially increases the venueu0027s sales. On the other hand, the venue can invest in the app-related infrastructure, which enables more users to use the app and further benefits the appu0027s business. The appsu0027 existing POI tariffs cannot fully incentivize the venueu0027s infrastructure investment, and hence cannot lead to the most effective app-venue collaboration. We design an optimal two-part tariff, which charges the venue for becoming a POI, and subsidizes the venue every time a user interacts with the POI. The subsidy design efficiently incentivizes the venueu0027s infrastructure investment, and we prove that our tariff achieves the highest appu0027s revenue among a general class of tariffs. Furthermore, we derive some counter-intuitive guidelines for the POI-based collaboration. For example, a bandwidth-consuming app should collaborate with a low-quality venue (users have low utilities when consuming the venueu0027s products).