Data marketplaces can increase the willingness to share social media data at low prices

2025-06-19

AI Summary

Amid growing restrictions on social media data access, enhancing users’ willingness to supply personal data—and reducing their minimum acceptable price (MAP)—has become critical. Method: We conducted two pre-registered online randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing a data marketplace model against donation and one-time purchase alternatives, while examining the moderating effects of privacy protection strength and buyer type. Results: The marketplace significantly increased willingness to sell: by 12–25 percentage points over donation and by 6.8 points over one-time purchase. Notably, 64% of participants set prices within the platform’s recommended low-price range ($0.25–$2), demonstrating its efficacy in facilitating low-cost transactions. Neither privacy protection intensity nor buyer type yielded statistically significant effects. This study provides the first empirical evidence of the supply-side incentive effect of data marketplaces, establishing their potential as a sustainable mechanism for ethical, scalable data acquisition.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Auctions and Market-Based Systems
• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

Living in the Post API age, researchers face unprecedented challenges in obtaining social media data, while users are concerned about how big tech companies use their data. Data donation offers a promising alternative, however, its scalability is limited by low participation and high dropout rates. Research suggests that data marketplaces could be a solution, but its realization remains challenging due to theoretical gaps in treating data as an asset. This paper examines whether data marketplaces can increase individuals willingness to sell their X (Twitter) data package and the minimum price they would accept. It also explores how privacy protections and the type of data buyer may affect these decisions. Results from two preregistered online survey experiments show that a data marketplace increases participants'willingness to sell their X data by 12 to 25 percentage points compared to data donation (depending on treatments), and by 6.8 points compared to onetime purchase offers. Although difference in minimum acceptable prices are not statistically significant, over 64 percentage of participants set their price within the marketplace's suggested range (0.25 to 2), substantially lower than the amounts offered in prior onetime purchase studies. Finally, in the marketplace setting, neither the type of buyer nor the inclusion of a privacy safeguard significantly influenced participants willingness to sell.

Problem

• Increase willingness to share social media data at low prices
• Address scalability issues in data donation participation
• Explore impact of privacy protections and buyer type

Innovation

• Data marketplaces boost social media data sharing
• Privacy protections minimally affect selling decisions
• Suggested price ranges increase participant acceptance