Data as infrastructure

Data is a key source of value for organisations and fuels AI. It can also reveal sensitive information and needs investment to be useful and secure.

In partnership with the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University, the Bennett School is undertaking a project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop a systematic approach to creating value for the economy through applied analysis of investment in data. We will test applied methods for estimating the returns to data investment, taking into account costs such as loss of privacy and trade-offs such as the private returns versus public benefit from data use. What policies will help ensure society invests adequately in data infrastructure? How should policy consider the value of public data?

Assessing the value of data is more complex than valuing conventional assets, and there is not yet an agreed framework for doing so. Much of the existing literature on data valuation is theoretical, and what empirical work does exist often uses market valuations as the basis for estimation, which are not always appropriate for understanding the potential for the wider economy.

The project is led by Professor Erik Brynjolfsson and Professor Diane Coyle, with Dr David Nguyen, Senior Research Scientist at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

This project builds on an earlier scoping study in partnership with the Open Data Institute and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, which produced a policy framework identifying key types of data and the characteristics determining the value of data.

The policy report incorporated insights from stakeholder interviews aimed at developing an understanding of the prevailing market characteristics of data, the reasons why voluntary private data sharing arrangements come about, and the barriers to further opening of public and private data. It identified outstanding questions for research and policy.

This project – The Value of Data – was led by Professor Diane Coyle and included Dr Stephanie Diepeveen and Dr Julia Wdowin at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy (now the Bennett School of Public Policy), and Dr Jeni Tennison, Peter Wells and Lawrence Kay at the Open Data Institute. A follow-up project funded by the Omidyar Network involved Diane Coyle and Annabel Manley.

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