Events

Professor Chun Chang
Professor of Finance
Huifu Chair Professor
Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance
Shanghai Jiao Tong University

In recent years, China has been exploring various new ways of defining data rights as well as unbundling them: The Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) established new rights such as the right to be informed and the right to make decisions（决定权）. The “Twenty Measures on Data（数据20条）” by the central government proposes a data property rights framework centered on the “trichotomy of property rights（持有、加工、经营三权分置）”. The implementation of these measures face challenges due to not well-defined “new types of rights” and “multi-stage evolution of data forms (from raw data to processed data, data product, and data assets).” How to define and allocate these rights across different stakeholders and across different data forms in order to balance efficiency, fairness, and privacy protection has become an important policy question. This paper considers how to unbundle and allocate data rights in financial sector. We build a three-party model comprising individual borrowers, a digital firm, and lenders. More clear definition and unbundling of two important data rights are studied: decision right to sell processed data and the right to its income. We compare how different allocations of these rights affect social welfare, financial inclusion, and privacy costs. In particular, granting all the rights to either borrowers or the digital firm is generally suboptimal. Granting the digital firm a more limited rights to operate processed data, while granting borrowers partial right to income of selling processed data or the consent right to selling processed data can improve social welfare. The effects of different rights arrangements on inclusiveness and privacy are also compared.