Valuating User Data in a Human-Centric Data Economy

Abstract: The idea of paying people for their data is increasingly seen as a promising direction for resolving privacy debates, improving the quality of online data, and even offering an alternative to labor-based compensation in a future dominated by automation and self-operating machines. In this paper we demonstrate how a Human-Centric Data Economy would compensate the users of an online streaming service. We borrow the notion of the Shapley value from cooperative game theory to define what a fair compensation for each user should be for movie scores offered to the recommender system of the service. Since determining the Shapley value exactly is computationally inefficient in the general case, we derive faster alternatives using clustering, dimensionality reduction, and partial information. We apply our algorithms to a movie recommendation data set and demonstrate that different users may have a vastly different value for the service. We also analyze the reasons that some movie ratings may be more valuable than others and discuss the consequences for compensating users fairly.