A data intermediary pays consumers for information about their preferences and sells the information so acquired to firms that use it to tailor their products and prices. The social dimension of the individual data---whereby an individual's data are predictive of the behavior of others---generates a data externality that reduces the intermediary's cost of acquiring information. We derive the intermediary's optimal data policy and show that it preserves the privacy of the consumers' identities while providing precise information about market demand to the firms. This enables the intermediary to capture the entire value of information as the number of consumers grows large.

中文翻译：

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社会数据经济学

数据中介向消费者支付有关其偏好信息的费用，并将如此获得的信息出售给使用它来定制产品和价格的公司。个人数据的社会维度——个人数据可以预测他人的行为——产生数据外部性，降低中介获取信息的成本。我们推导出中介的最优数据策略，并表明它在向公司提供有关市场需求的精确信息的同时，保护了消费者身份的隐私。随着消费者数量的增长，这使得中间商能够获取信息的全部价值。