Collaborative Research: The Value of Data

协作研究：数据的价值

• 批准号: 2149315
• 负责人: Jacopo Perego
• 金额: $ 12.31万
• 依托单位: Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-03-15 至 2024-02-29
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2149315&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Value; Data

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.

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，消费者数据通常被用来调解各种利益冲突的代理人的需求，例如买家和卖家，司机和乘客，或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帐户的数据的价值，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，并深入了解数据市场如何运作以及可能受到政策干预的影响。本研究还将对许多学者和政策制定者都认为数据市场的重要内容--如何对消费者的个人数据进行补偿的争论有所启发。具体而言，本研究将研究消费者的个人数据记录对作为业务投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中获得的回报（如平台的交易费）。它涉及其他组成部分，如果忽视这些组成部分，我们的评估可能会产生重大偏差。它们捕捉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其对买家的了解，以指导卖家的反应（例如，通过将买家集中到细分市场）。这种外部性可能使低支出买家的记录比高支出买家的记录更有价值。该项目的第一部分将研究中介已经拥有数据并可以在未经人们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保留他们的数据时，数据的价值如何变化。一个关键的见解是，隐私权不仅可以将财富从数据用户转移到数据源（即，从中间商到消费者），但也改变了数据记录本身的价值。例如，它可以增加一些人的记录的价值，而牺牲其他人的记录。因此，隐私可以在数据源之间产生再分配效应，这可能会导致社会不平等，隐私保护政策应该考虑到这一点。该奖项反映了NSF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。