Data Trading with a Monopoly Social Network: Outcomes are Mostly Privacy Welfare Damaging
Abstract
This paper argues that data of strategic individuals with heterogeneous privacy valuations in a distributed online social network (e.g., Facebook) will be under-priced, if traded in a monopoly buyer setting, and will lead to diminishing utilitarian welfare. This result, for a certain family of online community data trading problems, is in stark contrast to a popular information economics intuition that increased amounts of end-user data signals in a data market improves its efficiency. Our proposed theory paves the way for a future (counter-intuitive) analysis of data trading oligopoly markets for online social networks (OSNs).
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2012.08729,
title = {Data Trading with a Monopoly Social Network: Outcomes are Mostly Privacy Welfare Damaging},
author = {Ranjan Pal and Junhui Li and Yixuan Wang and Mingyan Liu and Swades De and Jon Crowcroft},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.08729},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
incrementally updated version to version in IEEE Networking Letters; This work is based upon results in NBER w26296