Pricing Strategy for Cloud Computing Services

The cloud services market exhibits unique characteristics such as instant accessibility, fluctuating demand and supply, and interruptible service provision. Various pricing mechanisms exist in current industry practice, however, none is comprehensive enough to capture all these features. In my work, I identify key factors related to cloud computing pricing. My dissertation includes three essays. They employ multiple approaches, including market survey, game theory modelling, simulation, lab experiments and econometric modelling, to analyse the pricing strategy of cloud services vendors. The first essay highlights nine important factors in current cloud pricing practice and proposes three missing factors based on a market survey. In the second essay, I build an analytical model and use simulation to derive optimal pricing strategies for a monopoly cloud services vendor that operates in the reserved services market and the spot services market. In the last piece of work, I examine the client’s willingness-to-pay for customized cloud services through behavioural experiments.