A Survey of Data Pricing Methods

Abstract

A data marketplace is an online venue that brings data owners, data brokers, and data consumers together and facilitates the commoditisation of data amongst them. Data pricing, as a
key function of a data marketplace, demands quantifying the monetary value of data. A considerable number of studies on data pricing can be found in the literature. This paper attempts to comprehensively review the state-of-the-art on existing data pricing studies to provide a general understanding of this emerging research area. Our key contribution lies in a new taxonomy of
data pricing studies that unifies different attributes determining data prices. The basis of our framework categorises these studies by the kind of market structure, be it sell-side, buy-side, or two-sided. Then on a sell-side market, the studies are further divided by query type, which defines
the way that a data consumer accesses the data, while on a buy-side market, the studies are divided according to the privacy notion, which defines the way to quantify privacy of data owners. In a two-sided market, both privacy notion and query type are used as the criteria. We systematicall examine the studies that fall into each category in our taxonomy. Lastly, we discuss gaps within
the existing research and define future research directions.

Keywords: Data Pricing, Data Market Places, Value of Data, Pricing Methods

JEL Classification: D49