Non-comparative versus Comparative Advertising of Quality

Two firms produce a good with a horizontal and a vertical character- istic called quality. The difference in the unobservable quality levels determines how the firms share the market. We consider two scenar- ios: In the first one, firms disclose quality; in the second one, they send costly signals thereof. Under non-comparative advertising a firm advertises its own quality, under comparative advertising a firm adver- tises the quality differential. In either scenario, under comparative ad- vertising the firms never advertise together which they may do under non-comparative advertising. Moreover, under comparative advertis- ing firms do not advertise when the informational value to consumers is small.

An Architecture to offer Cloud-Based Radio Access Network as a Service

This paper addresses the novel notion of offering a radio access network as a service. Its components may be instantiated on general purpose platforms with pooled resources (both radio and hardware ones) dimensioned on-demand, elastically and following the pay-per-use principle. A novel architecture is proposed that supports this concept. The architecture's success is in its modularity, well-defined functional elements and clean separation between operational and control functions. By moving much processing traditionally located in hardware for computation in the cloud, it allows the optimisation of hardware utilization and reduction of deployment and operation costs. It enables operators to upgrade their network as well as quickly deploy and adapt resources to demand. Also, new players may easily enter the market, permitting a virtual network operator to provide connectivity to its users.