Song Ma Awarded 2025 Jensen Prize for Work on How Data Is Priced and Traded

Professor Song Ma has won the 2025 Jensen Prize First Prize from the Journal of Financial Economics for "Data Sales and Data Dilution," written with Ernest Liu (Princeton) and Laura Veldkamp (Columbia).

Named for Michael C. Jensen, a co-founder of the journal, the Jensen Prize is awarded annually to the best paper published in the JFE in the areas of corporate finance and organizations, with winners selected by a vote of the journal's readership. It is among the most prestigious paper awards in financial economics.

The winning paper addresses a question at the heart of the digital economy: what determines the value of data, and how should markets for it work? Data looks like a textbook case for monopoly. Building a valuable dataset is expensive, but duplicating it for another customer costs essentially nothing. The paper identifies a countervailing force: a dataset becomes less valuable to each buyer as more buyers hold it, since any competitive edge gets spread thin. Anticipating future resales, buyers discount what they will pay today, so a seller's own future sales undercut its pricing power, an effect the authors term "data dilution."

The analysis also carries a policy lesson. The right market design can sustain firms' incentives to invest in high-quality data, while cracking down on profits in data markets is not automatically good for consumers. If regulation erodes the payoff to building good data, everyone can end up worse off.

Ma previously received the Jensen Prize in 2018, and he notes that winning it again seven years later makes the recognition especially meaningful. He credits the outstanding coauthors, collaborators, and colleagues he has learned from along the way.

This marks the second time Professor Ma has received the Jensen Prize, seven years after his 2018 award.

Read the winning paper here.