One of the internet's most profound social and business impacts has been the change in how many things are bought and sold. The rise of Amazon and eBay, for example, revolutionized consumer marketplaces. Multiple travel sites now enable a buyer to shop around for the best travel bargains. The pandemic accelerated this shift, with even art and cars now routinely bought without physical inspection.

Interestingly, no similar revolution has happened with data, though data has long been traded between and among people and institutions. This is not to say that no data trading occurs because consumer spending and stock market data are bought and sold every day. However, there should be many more data markets connecting data buyers and sellers, especially given available data creation and cloud storage technologies. The fact that they don't exist is an intriguing question to consider. Fortunately, recent work by Pantelis Koutroumpis (Oxford), Aija Leiponen (Cornell), and Llewellyn D W Thomas (Imperial College) examines this very issue.

The authors start their analysis by noting that most data are in "raw" form, a state in which they have limited value. In the language of economics, they are intermediate goods that need to be processed in some way to reach maximum value. In other words, a list of numbers in a database is of little use until it is connected with identifying information and then utilized for a value-creating purpose, e.g., consumer analysis or investing. In some ways, data are like patents in that the idea alone creates little value — it must be put to work in some way in order to make it worthwhile. Given the exponential rise in data creation in the past few decades, one would expect to find many markets connecting data sellers and buyers, but the authors present several issues that have prevented the wider development of data markets.