Emily is wearing a connected bracelet that measures her blood pressure on a regular basis. Emily can contribute to a world-wide dataset for the development breakthrough hypertension treatments. Emily’s personal data is of a high value for her. Eventually she may monetize her data to a health care company, under certain conditions. But it has a very small financial value among the millions of individual data sets constituting the world health database. In fact, the healthcare company is even more concerned about integrating data from disparate sources and choosing proper AI solutions to better understand patterns of disease and drivers of health.

Emily’s personal data valuation is close to zero on the data market. If Emily acts as a rational utility maximizer, monetary rewards are likely to be a wrong form of compensation to her. If Emily chooses to act for social good, she will be willing to get other forms of compensation for sharing her data to contribute to research on hypertension.