Workshop at EC 2026 · Rome

Foundations of Data Economics

ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC 2026)
Rome, Italy
Plenary Talks · Spotlight Sessions · Poster Session · Open Discussion

About the Workshop

The goal of this workshop is to bring together students, postdocs, and researchers from AI, economics, operations research, and computer science who are interested in the emerging area of data economics, with the aim of catalyzing new collaborations and charting foundational questions in this rapidly developing field.

Understanding Data as an Asset

Modeling data value — complementarities, diminishing returns, and its rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous nature under privacy constraints and statistical validity.

Incentives & Mechanisms

Designing mechanisms to reward data contributions, compensate for acquisition and privacy costs, and encourage high-quality sharing while accounting for externalities.

Data Pricing

Stable pricing strategies under different market structures — competition, oligopoly, monopoly — accounting for data's unique economic properties.

Equilibrium in Data Markets

Understanding stable behavior of buyers, sellers, and platforms (e.g., Snowflake, AWS) offering storage and ML services; incentives and market dynamics.

Plenary Speakers

Maryam Farboodi

Maryam Farboodi

MIT Sloan School of Management
Jason Hartline

Jason Hartline

Northwestern University
Ali Makhdoumi

Ali Makhdoumi

Duke University
Jacopo Perego

Jacopo Perego

Columbia University

Organizers

Bhaskar Ray Chaudhury

Bhaskar Ray Chaudhury

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Jugal Garg

Jugal Garg

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Ruta Mehta

Ruta Mehta

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Schedule

Plenary Talk 1
Maryam Farboodi — MIT Sloan School of Management
Plenary Talk 2
Ali Makhdoumi — Duke University
Spotlight Talks
Selected contributed presentations
Coffee Break
Networking
Plenary Talk 3
Jacopo Perego — Columbia University
Plenary Talk 4
Jason Hartline — Northwestern University
Poster Session
Contributed posters & open discussion

Call for Contributions

We seek contributions broadly on data economics for poster and spotlight presentation. We welcome theoretical, algorithmic, and empirical work on topics including data valuation, pricing, market design, incentive mechanisms, and equilibrium in data markets.

Submit Your Contribution