How to Sell a Dataset? Pricing Policies for Data Monetization

The wide variety of pricing policies used in practice by data-sellers suggests that there are significant challenges in pricing datasets. The selling of a dataset -- arranged in a row-column format, where rows represent records and columns represent attributes of the records -- is more nuanced than that of information goods like telephone minutes and bandwidth, in the sense that, for a buyer, it is not only the amount of data that matters but also the type of the data. We develop a utility framework that is appropriate for data-buyers and the corresponding pricing of the data by the data-seller.