Cooperative Multi-source Data Trading

Jin Cheng, Ningning Ding, John C. S. Lui, Jianwei Huang

Abstract: In the era of big data, data trading significantly enhances data-driven technologies by facilitating data sharing. Despite the clear advantages often experienced by data users when incorporating multiple sources, the topic of multi-source data trading remains largely unexplored. This paper designs a novel data trading framework, which enables multi-source data trading through multi-source cooperation. The proposed framework aims to improve data usage efficiency and increase seller revenue. In particular, we model data sellers’ cooperative decisions through the Nash bargaining framework and systematically outline the interactions between sellers and buyers as a two-stage Stackelberg game. A key contribution of this work is the consideration of coupling among diverse data products, which is essential but often overlooked in prior studies. We properly classify data’s utility into endogenous and relational categories to disentangle the coupling. Despite the inherent non-convex nature of the optimization problem, we methodically derive the closed-form optimal solutions by decomposing the problem into several subproblems. Interestingly, we reveal that, under our proposed framework, sellers’ revenue initially remains steady with the increase of product coupling level, but begins to rise once the level exceeds a certain threshold due to the substitute effect. Finally, experimental results show that our proposed framework can improve the seller’s profit by up to 46.32% compared to traditional data trading methods in the current data market.