A Customer-Centric Game-Theoretic Framework for Strategic Enterprise Network Investment and Future-Proof Private Networks

Abstract

Enterprise customers invest in private networks to realize business value under uncertain technology maturity, vendor incentives, organizational disagreement, deployment risk, and future upgrade pressure. This paper develops customer value assurance (CVA) as the central objective for strategic enterprise network investment. Game theory is used as the analytical engine through three coupled games: vendor-technology selection, internal organizational bargaining, and deployment validation with trust. The framework combines customer personas, optionality, maturity scoring, future-proof and AI-readiness indices, deployment confidence, regret, and explainable recommendation output. A fair-game mechanism requires candidates to pass customersafe network-fit thresholds before commercial ranking and allows scale deployment only after staged evidence. Illustrative scenarios show that the customer-optimal strategy depends on personaspecific weights, failure impact, validation depth, and future optionality.