Abstract: This paper discusses the pricing of data as a factor of production in the process of circulation with a stylized economic model. This paper differentiates the public data pricing, which aims at maximizing social welfare, and the commercial data pricing, which aims at maximizing profit. The model reveals two important takeaways: first, the goals of social welfare maximization and profit maximization may converge in the data economy, which crucially depends on the data quality of the supply side and the data “digestion” and utilization ability of the demand side; secondly, with the improvement of data quality, the price gap between welfare maximization and profit maximization does not change monotonically. Under a certain threshold, the gap grows even larger. The root cause behind this result lies in the uniqueness of the data element—the data itself comes from all citizens, and it may also bring new value and profit to all citizens through integration with other elements. The above conclusions are expected to bring directional implications for the current and future phase of public data operations.

Key words: data as product factor, data pricing, public data, economic model