Data as an economic resource: Developing a data economy

Advances in computing and computing technology, mathematics, and statistics have decreased the costs of collecting, processing, and analysing data while at the same time increasing the returns from it. This has led to rapid changes in society, business and markets, and governmental organisation. This talk will briefly discuss the nature of data as an economic good and then present an example –derived from my earlier work – illustrating these properties. We will then dwell on the nature of returns from data and whether markets can exhaust all these returns and if they cannot then what role should policy play. This, of course, has some parallels to earlier debates on intellectual property rights. I will discuss the nature and incentives of various entities involved in the data value chain and how they will strategically respond to various market and policy interventions. I will end with presenting some thoughts on why data exchanges are ideas worth pursuing and how they can be designed keeping individual incentives in mind.