EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Nonrivalry and the Economics of Data

Charles Jones and Christopher Tonetti

No 26260, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Data is nonrival: a person’s location history, medical records, and driving data can be used by any number of firms simultaneously. Nonrivalry leads to increasing returns and implies an important role for market structure and property rights. Who should own data? What restrictions should apply to the use of data? We show that in equilibrium, firms may not adequately respect the privacy of consumers. But nonrivalry leads to other consequences that are less obvious. Because of nonrivalry, there may be large social gains to data being used broadly across firms, even in the presence of privacy considerations. Fearing creative destruction, firms may choose to hoard data they own, leading to the inefficient use of nonrival data. Instead, giving the data property rights to consumers can generate allocations that are close to optimal. Consumers balance their concerns for privacy against the economic gains that come from selling data to all interested parties.

JEL-codes: E0 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-mac and nep-mic
Note: EFG PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published as Charles I. Jones & Christopher Tonetti, 2020. "Nonrivalry and the Economics of Data," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 110(9), pages 2819-2858, September.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26260.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Nonrivalry and the Economics of Data (2020) Downloads
Working Paper: Nonrivalry and the Economics of Data (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26260

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26260

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26260