Preparing Future Business Data Sharing via a Meta-Platform for Data Marketplaces: Exploring Antecedents and Consequences of Data Sovereignty

Meta-platforms have received considerable Information Systems scholarly attention in recent years. Meta-platforms enable platform-to-platform openness and are especially beneficial to amplifying network effects in highly-specialized markets. A promising emerging context for applying meta-platforms is data marketplaces—a special type of digital platform designed for business data sharing that is vastly fragmented. However, data providers have sovereignty concerns: the risk of losing control over the data that they share through meta-platforms. This research aims to explore antecedents and consequences of data sovereignty concerns in meta-platforms for data marketplaces. Based on interviews with fifteen potential data providers and five data marketplace experts, we identify data sovereignty antecedents, such as (potentially) less trustworthy data marketplace participants, unclear use cases, and data provenance difficulties. Data sovereignty concerns have many consequences, including knowledge spillovers to competitors and reputational damage. This study is among the first that empirically develops a pre-conceptualization for data sovereignty in this novel context, thus laying the groundwork for designing future data marketplace meta-platform solutions.