Data as a Public Good: Experimental Insights on the Optimal Design of B2b Data Sharing Platforms

Data sharing between firms is widely believed to promote firms’ ability to innovate and compete. To this end, Business-to-Business (B2B) data sharing platforms, such as 'GAIA-X', facilitate the sharing of data between firms. However, many of these initiatives struggle. Although firms find it advantageous to use the data of other firms, they are reluctant to share their own data because they fear that this data could be used to their competitive disadvantage. Robust economic insights on how to design B2B data sharing platforms in such an environment are scarce. We identify two important dimensions for the contractual and technological design architecture of B2B data sharing platforms: control and transparency. Control denotes the degree to which a firm can specify which other firm can access how much data of its data. Transparency denotes a firm's information about other firm's sharing behavior and the resulting profits. Using an economic laboratory experiment, we find that both, control and transparency are important dimensions of the design of B2B data sharing platforms, as an increase in either of these dimensions can significantly increase a firm's propensity to share data with other (rival) firms. However, we also show that more control does not always lead to more data sharing, and that the impact of the control and transparency dimensions depend on the duration of the market relationships. Hence, our results bear important insights for success factors of B2B data sharing platforms.