Data governance and property rights under privacy constraints

Identify property rights and governance mechanisms for training data that enable efficient pooling and allocation while safeguarding privacy and preventing monopolization, and evaluate institutional designs (e.g., data trusts and cooperatives) and technical infrastructure (e.g., privacy-preserving computation and provenance tracking) to support market formation.

Background

The paper highlights tensions between individual data ownership (as in GDPR), platform-controlled aggregation, and open commons. Nonrivalry allows simultaneous use, but excludability is needed for markets. Section 6 calls for legal frameworks, institutional designs, and technical infrastructure to balance privacy, efficiency, and competition.

Historical precedents (e.g., oil, spectrum) show property-right choices shape market structure and long-run outcomes, motivating rigorous governance designs for data.

References

Building on these foundations, we outline four open research problems foundational to data economics: measuring context-dependent value, balancing governance with privacy, estimating data's contribution to production, and designing mechanisms for heterogeneous, compositional goods.

— The Economics of AI Training Data: A Research Agenda  (2510.24990 - Oderinwale et al., 28 Oct 2025) in Abstract

Questions about who controls genomic data and how these data can be used are not fully resolved.

— Responsible Integration of AI in Cancer Genomics: Barriers, Risks, and Pathways to Trustworthy Clinical Translation  (2608.30912 - İlgen et al., 31 Aug 2026) in Section 5.3, Privacy, Bias, and Data Stewardship

Several open challenges remain, including the governance of biometric and neurophysiological data, interoperable enforcement of IP rights across platforms, and scalable trust management in distributed, multi-stakeholder ecosystems.

— Security and Privacy in the Musical Metaverse: Threat Analysis and Design Implications  (2609.03659 - Turchet et al., 3 Sep 2026) in Conclusions