Research Projects

The project research is on the Law & Economics of Big Data and Tech Platforms, a new forms of quasi-public goods. The ‘Big Data’ (BD), large datasets put together from diverse sources like surveys, tech platforms, internet of things, etc., is a source of valuable information. The information can be used by numerous entities simultaneously, making it ‘non-rivalrous’, a key property of a public good (PG). Already BD based services are extensively used for marketing, price discrimination, innovation, medical and scientific research. However, BD services are only partially ‘non-excludable’. Encryption technology can calibrate differentiated access of users/buyers to the data information and services, thus making BD a quasi-PG. BD is widely hailed as a ‘renewable input’ for ‘combinatorial innovations’ as the predictive power and benefits from BD increase exponentially with its size and diversity. Informational worth of BD is much more than sum of its constituent sources. That is, the economic and scientific value of BD goes up exponentially as more and more sources are pooled. This feature of BD, however, makes it vulnerable to the problem of ‘anti-common’, a market failure. Since data sources aggregation is subject to hold out by the owners. As is shown in Appendix, the cost of inefficiency increases non-linearly with the number of data sources involved. Asymmetric information between data aggregators and the users also leads to market failure. E.g, compared to the users of social media, the tech platform knows much about nature and benefits from the personal data. The above two sources together make aggregation of BD from multiple and diverse sources an important but challenging task. On top of it, mare possession of BD gives tech giants a monopolistic edge over other players and consumers. Market worth of Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company) alone is more than USD 1.18 Trillion. In comparison, Airbus, one of the largest European industrial companies is worth just USD 86 billion. Gains from BD will vary across countries and firms within a country. As a part of this project, we develop an analytical (mathematical) framework to examine the nature aggregation problem involved in generation of Big Data and market failures in BD under different market structures. Also we examine the economic implications of the two-sided monopoly enjoyed by tech platforms as quasi-public goods. Finally, we use project research to propose law and governance framework for Big Data and Data localization in the light of project findings and by studying leading legal jurisdictions, e.g., US, EU and their experience with the market in Big Data based services for promoting collection, storage and processing of Big Data.