4,606 research outputs found
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
The Design of Arbitrage-Free Data Pricing Schemes
Motivated by a growing market that involves buying and selling data over the
web, we study pricing schemes that assign value to queries issued over a
database. Previous work studied pricing mechanisms that compute the price of a
query by extending a data seller's explicit prices on certain queries, or
investigated the properties that a pricing function should exhibit without
detailing a generic construction. In this work, we present a formal framework
for pricing queries over data that allows the construction of general families
of pricing functions, with the main goal of avoiding arbitrage. We consider two
types of pricing schemes: instance-independent schemes, where the price depends
only on the structure of the query, and answer-dependent schemes, where the
price also depends on the query output. Our main result is a complete
characterization of the structure of pricing functions in both settings, by
relating it to properties of a function over a lattice. We use our
characterization, together with information-theoretic methods, to construct a
variety of arbitrage-free pricing functions. Finally, we discuss various
tradeoffs in the design space and present techniques for efficient computation
of the proposed pricing functions.Comment: full pape
The Economics of Internet Markets
The internet has facilitated the creation of new markets characterized by large scale, increased customization, rapid innovation and the collection and use of detailed consumer and market data. I describe these changes and some of the economic theory that has been useful for thinking about online advertising markets, retail and business-to-business e-commerce, internet job matching and financial exchanges, and other internet platforms. I also discuss the empirical evidence on competition and consumer behavior in internet markets and some directions for future research.internet, market, innovation, advertising, retail, e-commerce, financial exchanges
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