With the advent of the Internet of things, cloud computing and social networking, a new kind of public goods, public service based on big data, has taken more and more attention. Except the features of non-exclusive and... [ view full abstract ]
With the advent of the Internet of things, cloud computing and social networking, a new kind of public goods, public service based on big data, has taken more and more attention. Except the features of non-exclusive and non-competitive, what makes it different with other public goods is that the providers are the consumers. After the citizens open their own behavioral data, service providers could mine and analyze the data, then provide customer-friendly outcomes to the public.
However, as the tragedy of the commons said, the machining costs is borne by the government which makes the quantity and quality of the service at low level. To solve the public goods problems, researchers emphasized to rule the action of the customers. For example, when referring to ‘the tragedy of the commons’ and ‘the logit of collective action’, the assumption of Hardin(1968) and Olson(2009) is people are reasonable and what people do is to fulfill his or her own interests. So when self-interests meet the collective needs, the former win. The best way to settle this dilemma is privatization or governed by the nation. Ostrom pointed that people are not always reasonable when they bargain with others (Offerman, T., 1997), and the ones who care about equity will punish the free-riders (Fehr. E., & Schmidt, K. M.,1999). But the provider of the common goods are different with the customers, so their actions should be normalized by institutions strictly and the development of social norm (Ostrom, E. ,1990; Ostrom, E.，2014).
In this dilemma of the big data age, the general way of ruling the action of the customers doesn’t work at all, and the institutions of an adaptive data analysis mechanism which makes the transformation process are the key factors. Private organizations are protagonists and the ties between the public and the government, which is different with the traditional principle –agency relationship that the government makes contracts as meticulous as possible to meet an obscure policy criterion without asking consumers. All the participants in the process have a complex multi-agent relationship with the sharing rights and obligations. To describe the relationship and dialogue with the classic theories on public goods, we conduct a case study toward a smart service project in Chaoyang district, Beijing and show that how do the flexible institutions interact with context, and why a new multi-agent relationship for public service could meet the challenge of the big data age.
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Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge university press.
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