Models of Exchanged Datasets and Interactions of Buyers in the Data Market: Toward Multi-Agent Simulators for System Design

Value creation by reusing data as exchangeable resources has been widely studied as a new source of innovation, resulting in the establishment of a data market and its ecosystem. However, owing to the nascent nature of the market, observable information on exchanged datasets and interactions among stakeholders, such as buyers and providers, in the market are limited. Therefore, a lack of observable information that contributes to designing the market system and formulating regulations to promote the sound growth of data markets exists. This study modeled exchanged datasets and data buyers as agents, the smallest units of the data market components, and prepared seven scenarios for four market sizes. We simulated the effects of datasets and agent models with different market sizes on the agents' data purchases and emergence of popular datasets and discussed the factors that affect the purchase frequency distribution of the datasets. We present the experimental results and new implications for developing a data market simulator. The development of this simulator is expected to significantly advance research on the market understanding and system design in data markets.