Data Pricing - From Economics to Data Science

Abstract

Data are invaluable. How can we assess the value of data objectively and quantitatively? Pricing data, or information goods in general, has been studied and practiced in dispersed areas and principles, such as economics, data management, data mining, electronic commerce, and marketing. In this tutorial, we present a unified and comprehensive overview of this important direction. We examine various motivations behind data pricing, understand the economics of data pricing, review the development and evolution of pricing models, and compare the proposals of marketplaces of data. We cover both digital products, such as ebooks and MP3 music, and data products, such as data sets, data queries and machine learning models. We also connect data pricing with the highly related areas, such as cloud service pricing, privacy pricing, and decentralized privacy preserving infrastructure like blockchains.