When

August 28, 2020 | 1:00 pm

August 28, 2020 | 2:30 pm

Jacopo Perego - From Columbia University to present "The Price of Data"  which is joint work with Simone Galperti (UCSD) and Aleksandr Levkun (UCSD)

Abstract: Data has become an essential commodity in modern economies. We propose a theory of how to individually price the entries of a dataset so as to reflect their proper values. Our key insight is to leverage the duality relation between this problem and the problem of optimally combining the entries of a dataset to produce information for third-parties, which ultimately determines a value for the dataset as a whole. Our prices can be interpreted as the outcome of frictionless competitive markets and, as such, they represent a normative benchmark for actual markets for data. We show that our pricing formula accounts for the externalities that can exist between data entries and study how prices may be affected by data privacy protection. We apply our theory to price consumer data in two settings: a monopolist discriminating between buyers and draftly informed firms competing à la Cournot.

"The presentation slides are available here." Slides