The World Wide Web is a massive network of interlinked documents. One of the reasons the World Wide Web is so successful is the fact that most content is available free of any charge. Inspired by the success of the World Wide Web, the Web of Data applies the same strategy of interlinking to data. To this point, most of data in the Web of Data is also free of charge. The fact that the data is freely available raises the question of financing these services, however. As we will discuss in this paper, advertisement and donations cannot easily be applied to this new setting. To create incentives to subsidize data providers, we propose that sponsors should pay the providers to promote sponsored data. In return, sponsored data will be privileged over non-sponsored data. Since it is not possible to enforce a certain ordering on the data the user will receive, we propose to split up the data into different batches and deliver these batches with different delays. In this way, we can privilege sponsored data without withholding any non-sponsored data from the user. In this paper, we introduce a new concept of a delayed-answer auction, where sponsors can pay to prioritize their data. We introduce a new model which captures the particular situation when a user access data in the Web of Data. We show how the weighted Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction mechanism can be applied to our scenario and we discuss how certain parameters can influence the nature of our auction. With our new concept, we build a first step to a free yet financial ABSTRACTThe World Wide Web is a massive network of interlinked documents. One of the reasons the World Wide Web is so successful is the fact that most content is available free of any charge. Inspired by the success of the World Wide Web, the Web of Data applies the same strategy of interlinking to data. To this point, most of data in the Web of Data is also free of charge. The fact that the data is freely available raises the question of financing these services, however. As we will discuss in this paper, advertisement and donations cannot easily be applied to this new setting.To create incentives to subsidize data providers, we propose that sponsors should pay the providers to promote sponsored data. In return, sponsored data will be privileged over non-sponsored data.Since it is not possible to enforce a certain ordering on the data the user will receive, we propose to split up the data into different batches and deliver these batches with different delays. In this way, we can privilege sponsored data without withholding any non-sponsored data from the user. In this paper, we introduce a new concept of a delayed-answer auction, where sponsors can pay to prioritize their data. We introduce a new model which captures the particular situation when a user access data in the Web of Data. We show how the weighted Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction mechanism can be applied to our scenario and we discuss how certain parameters can influence the nature of our auction. With our new concept, we build...

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We propose a market design solution for a market for distributed data. The main challenges addressed by our solution are (1) different data providers produce different databases that can be joined to produce answers for users' queries; (2) data providers have high fixed costs for producing their databases; and (3) buyers and sellers can arrive dynamically to the market. Our design relies on using a Markov chain with states corresponding to different numbers of allocated databases. The transition probabilities between different states are governed by the payments suggested by the market platform to the data providers. The main challenge in this setting is to guarantee dynamic incentive compatibility, i.e., to ensure that buyers and sellers are not incentivized to arrive late to the market or to misreport their costs or values. To achieve this, we disentangle the payments suggested by the market platform to the sellers from the posted prices exposed to the buyers. We prove that the buyer-optimal payments that are exposed to sellers are non-increasing which prevents late arrivals of sellers. Further, we demonstrate that the posted prices exposed to buyers constitute a martingale process (i.e., late arrivals lead to the same expected price). Finally, we show that our design guarantees zero expected average budget deficit and we perform a number of simulations to validate our model.

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