A Theory of Pricing Private Data

Personal data has value to both its owner and to institutions who would like to analyze it. Privacy mechanisms protect the owner's data while releasing to analysts noisy versions of aggregate query results. But such strict protections of individual's data have not yet found wide use in practice. Instead, Internet companies, for example, commonly provide free services in return for valuable sensitive information from users, which they exploit and sometimes sell to third parties. As the awareness of the value of the personal data increases, so has the drive to compensate the end user for her private information. The idea of monetizing private data can improve over the narrower view of hiding private data, since it empowers individuals to control their data through financial means. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework for assigning prices to noisy query answers, as a function of their accuracy, and for dividing the price amongst data owners who deserve compensation for their loss of privacy. Our framework adopts and extends key principles from both differential privacy and query pricing in data markets. We identify essential properties of the price function and micro-payments, and characterize valid solutions.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figures. Best Paper Award, to appear in the 16th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), 201

State of Watershed Payments: An Emerging Marketplace

A global research effort conducted by Ecosystem Marketplace identified a total of approximately 288 payments for watershed services (PWS) and water quality trading (WQT) programs in varying stages of activity over the past 30 years. In 2008, the baseline year, about 127 programs were actively receiving payments or transacting credits. The total transaction value from all programs actively engaged in 2008 is estimated at US$9.3 billion. Over the entire time span of recorded activity, total transaction value is estimated at slightly more than US$50 billion, impacting some 3.24 billion hectares

The Tragedy of Capitalism

A review of contemporary capitalism, and the debt-based money system, with a consideration of various monetary reform proposals within the context of a changing monetary realit

Financial evaluation of mental accounting

Mental accounting, defined as a set of cognitive processes that allows the organization of financial activities and facilitates money management; First of all, it helps people to compare the returns / incomes in return for their expenses and the costs to be incurred, and enables them to make decisions through a different mental account for the income tax or value added tax etc. they will pay in their investments. In the process of mental accounting, self-employed taxpayers may consider the correct declaration of tax, but they can also make different tax calculations, and even obtain information in consultation with their professionals. It is known that some professionals use mental accounting themselves by helping self-employed people fondly. It is impossible today to check whether mental accounting is related to tax knowledge, business and personality traits, and the degree of association with the intended tax behavior. The conclusions have been reached by a study in this regard; - While some taxpayers mentally separate taxes from turnover, others are not (integrators ) , - Where there are small differences in mental accounting between income tax and VAT, and, - Confirmatory factor analysis, tax information and mental accounting are different structures (Journal of Economic Psychology Nr. 70 , January 2019, P: 125-139). On the other hand, mental accounting is a strategy used in controlling personal spending, consumption, and investments as a cognitive set of operations in monitoring one's financial/financial business (=activity) and transactions. These are classified in mental accounts, meaning that individuals monitor all of their expenses separately and include the process of personal decision making, correction, control or abandonment of decisions. In particular, when multiple options are encountered, they are evaluated jointly-the results of different decisions are combined or evaluated separately. This depends on the emotional and intellectual structures of the person, along with the risk and expenditure criteria that the person undertakes. Because the decision is between sentimentality and thought, and results in rational-real or irrational-non-real results. In fact, they have a positive relationship with education, financial knowledge, money management and tax awareness in mental accounting. A consumer or investor/businessman in the decision process, including most accounting and Finance, Management Accounting, Financial Accounting and tax accounting are associated with, and are affected by them and affect them. These aspects are quite interesting.peer-reviewe

New Zealand Working For Families programme: Methodological considerations for evaluating MSD programmes

The methodological review is the second part of the evaluation research commissioned by the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) in 2005 to help in the preparation of the evaluation of the Working for Families (WFF) programme. This review enumerates the key evaluation questions identified by MSD as central to their policy concerns and considers how the features of WFF could affect evaluation. It details the methodological and data requirements that must be addressed in order to meet the four key evaluation objectives, namely: (1) tracking and evaluating the implementation and delivery of WFF (2) identifying changes in entitlement take-up and reasons for it (3) establishing the impact of WFF on employment-related outcomes (4) assessing WFF’s effect on net income and quality of life more generally. The methodological review complements the literature review by reviewing evaluations from around the world that are pertinent to WFF. An overview of evaluation methods is provided, concentrating on particular issues that arise within the WFF context. Section 2 focuses on implementation and delivery. Section 3 covers the issues related to take-up and entitlement and their evaluation. Section 4 discusses the evaluation methodologies that can be used in evaluating programmes such as WFF and introduces the data requirements they entail. Making work pay is the focus of section 5. Finally, section 6 examines hardship and poverty, living standards and wellbeing.

Can financial markets be tapped to help poor people cope with weather risks ?

Poor households in rural areas are particularly vulnerable to risks that reduce incomes and increase expenditures. Most past research has focused on risk-coping strategies for the rural poor, specially on micro-level and household actions. These are risks that can been shared within a community or extended family. These strategies are effective for independent risks, but ineffective for covariate or systemic risks. The authors focus on private and public mechanisms for managing covariate risk for natural disasters. When many households within the same community face risks that create losses for all, traditional coping mechanisms are likely to fail. Such covariate risks are not uncommon in many developing countries, especially where farming remains a major source of income. The authors focus on risks related to weather events (such as excess rain, droughts, freezes, and high winds) that have a severe impact on rural incomes. Weather insurance could cover the covariate risk for a community of poor households through formal and informal risk-sharing arrangements among households that are purchasing these weather contracts. Given recent Mexican innovations targeted at helping the poor cope with catastrophe weather events, the authors use Mexico as a case study. In Mexico, poor households are exposed to systemic risks, such as droughts and floods, that affect the economic livelihood of their region. Catastrophic insurance is useful for small farmers, although commercially oriented small farmers may wish to obtain coverage for less catastrophic events. Weather insurance could meet this need. It pays out according to the frequency and intensity of specific weather events. Because weather insurance depends on the occurrences and objective measure of intensity of a specific event, it does not require individual farm inspection that can be very costly for small farm. The authors argue that a key issue of delivering insurance to small farmers is the existence of producer organizations. In Mexico, the farmer mutual insurance funds provide a good example. These funds provide insurance to their members by pulling together resources to pay for future indemnities and reinsures itself from major systemic risks that could hurt simultaneously all their members.Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Health Economics&Finance,Labor Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Hazard Risk Management,Insurance&Risk Mitigation

Inter-firm Alliances during Pre-standardization in ICT

alliances, ICT, standardization

Access to financial services in Colombia : the"unbanked"in Bogota

The authors look at the depth of the financial sector in Bogota in terms of the"financial exclusion"of those, particularly poorer citizens, who operate without accounts in formal financial institutions-the unbanked. They begin with a review of the overall decline in financial intermediation from 1998 to 2003, which explains, in part, the high percentage of unbanked-61 percent in a recent household survey in Bogota. The authors next look at the banking system today, concluding that the present challenge is to increase financial intermediation overall, especially with the poor. Their analysis shows that Colombia's banks provide costly services mainly catered toward high-income clients. Existing fees and costs of checking, savings, and loan services average 5-10 percent of a monthly minimum wage, making them hard to afford for low-income clients. The authors also explore the characteristics and impacts of financial exclusion associated with lower and more uncertain incomes, lower education, and closer links to the informal sector. They cite the household survey conducted in Bogota, showing that 70 percent of the unbanked earn less than one minimum wage per month, are three times more likely to be unemployed than the banked, and have lower education levels. The unbanked save and borrow largely in the informal sector, at greater risk and greater cost. At the same time, however, high home ownership rates show that the unbanked have the capacity to build assets, demonstrating that they have"bankable"characteristics. The authors conclude with recommendations for government and for the financial sector to broaden access for the benefit of public and private sectors, and for the unbanked.Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Financial Intermediation,Settlement of Investment Disputes

Business Informality in Colombia: An Obstacle For Creative Destruction

This document studies the effects of business informality in terms of distortions in resource absorption, particularly labor, by informal companies. It also assesses the consequences of lower demand for labor of informal firms over aggregate productivity. With firm level data from the DANE Micro-establishments Survey, a matching exercise between formal and informal firms is conducted. It was found that the latter hire fewer employees than formal firms with the same characteristics, including Total Factor Productivity. The matching results allow using counterfactual demands of labor of informal firms to calculate and compare the real and counterfactual aggregate productivity levels. The results indicate that if informal firms would demand the amount of employment demanded by similar formal firms, market share distributionof firms would improve and this would positively affect aggregate productivity.Informal sector, Labor demand, Factor demand, Aggregate productivity, Colombia.