Why not one big database? - Principles for data ownership. Decision Support Systems

this research concern incentive principles which drive information sharing and affect database value. Many real world centralization and standardization efforts have failed, typically because departments lacked incentives or needed greater local autonomy. While intangible factors such as "ownership " have been described as the key to providing incentives, these soft issues have largely eluded formal characterization. Using an incomplete contracts approach from economics, we model the costs and benefits of restructuring organizational control, including critical intangible factors, by explicitly considering the role of data "ownership. " There are two principa