Pricing Aggregate Queries in a Data Marketplace

In a data marketplace, producers of data provide query answers to consumers in exchange for payment. A market for data allows capital to flow from data consumers to data producers. This helps to finance the costs of data collection and dissemination, thereby increasing the availability of data throughout society. While nascent data markets exist on the Web, they are currently limited in the pricing mechanisms and interactions they support. In this paper we propose new criteria for interactive pricing in a data market: price functions should be non-disclosive, arbitrage-free, and regret-free. We study the structure of price functions meeting these criteria, and distinguish between NP-complete and PTIME cases for computing a conforming price function.