A pricing model for subscriptions in data transactions

Abstract

With the increasing demands for data, the subscription scheme came into being in the face of pricing for an extensive and unfixed number of data items. However, in the existing subscription scheme, a diversity of customers in the real market may lead to the lack of stability, which means risking the failure of pricing. Additionally, the study involves arbitrage-free, an essential economics concept, which is not reasonable on data items. To address these problems, this paper provides insights for designing an improved subscription scheme that includes two components: the calculation and the specific validity. On the one hand, the calculation improves the existing scheme by building a new structure that combines different customers' behaviours instead of the separated calculation in the existing scheme, and can steadily set prices for subscriptions to maximise the sellers' profit even in a real market. On the other hand, the specific validity shows the improvement towards arbitrage-free by taking the characteristics of data subscriptions into account. In other words, the specific validity endows the scheme with more rationality.