Nonrivalry and the Economics of Data

Charles Jones and Christopher Tonetti

No 477, 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: Data is a nonrival good: a person's location history, genome sequence, or driving data can be used by any number of firms without being diminished. Romer (1990) showed that the nonrivalry of ideas has first-order economic implications. While data and ideas are different in important ways, the nonrivalry of data similarly has implications for economic growth and welfare. Do markets produce the right amount of data? Who should own data? We show that individual firms, fearful of creative destruction, may choose in equilibrium to hoard any data they own. Yet there may be large social gains to sharing data. For example, the allocation in which consumers own their data and sell it to many firms leads the economy to operate with a higher degree of increasing returns to scale. Even in a semi-endogenous growth model in which long-run growth is invariant to standard policies, data sharing can lead to faster economic growth.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Nonrivalry and the Economics of Data (2020)
Working Paper: Nonrivalry and the Economics of Data (2019)
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:red:sed018:477

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().