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arXiv · 2012.08729

Data Trading with a Monopoly Social Network: Outcomes are Mostly Privacy Welfare Damaging

Ranjan Pal·Junhui Li·Yixuan Wang·Mingyan Liu·Swades De·Jon Crowcroft
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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).

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Ranjan Pal, Junhui Li, Yixuan Wang, Mingyan Liu, Swades De, Jon Crowcroft. 2020-12-16. Data Trading with a Monopoly Social Network: Outcomes are Mostly Privacy Welfare Damaging. https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.08729

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