Collaborative Research: The Value of Data

这项研究将调查消费者的数据对使用它的公司的价值。在许多数字平台中，消费者数据经常被用来调解各种利益冲突的代理人的需求，比如买家和卖家，司机和乘客，或者社交媒体用户和广告商。这使得确定数据的价值变得特别复杂。这项研究将解决复杂性问题，并提供一个更完整的数据价值说明，特别是它对隐私保护政策的依赖。通过这样做，它将促进我们对数字经济中数据需求的理解，并提供对数据市场如何运作以及可能受到政策干预影响的见解。这项研究还将阐明关于如何对消费者的数据进行个人补偿的争论，许多学者和政策制定者认为，这是一个正常运行的数据市场的一个重要方面。更具体地说，这个研究项目将研究是什么决定了个人消费者的数据记录对将其用作其业务输入的中介机构的价值。例如，这样的记录可以是电子商务平台存储在其服务器上的买家的特征。当数据被第三方（如平台）用于战略性地指导多个代理（如买家和卖家）之间的互动时，评估其价值是复杂的，需要一种新的方法。该项目表明，这个价值不仅仅是中介直接从记录（如平台的交易费用）中获得的回报。它涉及到其他因素，如果忽略这些因素，可能会严重影响我们的评估。它们捕捉到不同买家记录之间的外部性，不是因为统计相关性，而是因为平台如何划分买家的知识，从而指导卖家的反应（例如，通过将买家汇集到细分市场中）。这种外部性可以使低消费买家的记录比高消费买家的记录更有价值。该项目的第一部分将研究中介机构已经拥有数据并可以在未经用户同意的情况下使用数据的情况。它的核心贡献是展示如何正确评估单个记录的价值并描述其所有组成部分。该项目的第二部分将研究当每个消费者可以从平台上保留他们的数据时，数据的价值是如何变化的。一个关键的见解是，隐私权不仅可能将财富从数据使用者转移到数据源（即从中间商转移到消费者），而且还可能改变数据记录本身的价值。例如，它可以以牺牲其他人的记录为代价来增加某些人的记录的价值。因此，隐私可以在数据源之间产生再分配效应，这可能导致社会不平等，隐私保护政策应考虑到这一点。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This research will investigate the value that the data of a consumer has for the firm that uses it. In many digital platforms, consumer data is often used to intermediate the needs of various agents with conflicting interests—such as buyers and sellers, drivers and riders, or social-media users and advertisers. This makes determining the value of data especially complex. This research will tackle the complexity issue and provide a more complete account of the value of data—especially its dependence on privacy-protection policies. By doing so, it will advance our understanding of the demand for data in the digital economy and provide insights into how data markets work and may be affected by policy interventions. This research will also shed light on the debate about how to individually compensate consumers for their data, which many scholars and policymakers believe to be an essential aspect of a functioning data market.More specifically, this research project will study what determines the value of an individual consumer’s data record for the intermediary that uses it as an input in its business. For instance, such a record can be the characteristics of a buyer that an e-commerce platform stores on its servers. When data is used by a third party (like a platform) to strategically direct interactions between multiple agents (like buyers and sellers), assessing its value is complicated and calls for a new approach. The project shows that this value is not just the payoff the intermediary derives directly from a record (like a platform’s transaction fee). It involves other components, which can significantly bias our assessments if ignored. They capture externalities between the records of, say, different buyers not because of a statistical correlation, but because of how the platform partitions its knowledge of the buyers so as to direct sellers’ responses (e.g., by pooling buyers into market segments). Such externalities can render the record of a low-spending buyer more valuable than that of a high-spending buyer. The first part of the project will study contexts where the intermediary already owns the data and can use it without people’s consent. Its core contribution is to show how to properly assess the value of individual records and characterize all its components. The second part of the project will study how the value of data changes when each consumer can withhold their data from the platform. One key insight is that privacy rights may not only shift wealth from data-users to data-sources (i.e., from intermediaries to consumers), but also change the value of data records itself. For instance, it can increase the value of some people’s records at the expense of others. Thus, privacy can have redistributive effects across data-sources, which may contribute to social inequality and should be taken into account by privacy-protection policies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.