Measuring transaction costs in spatial data infrastructures: Examples of Sweden and Germany

Many national mapping agencies offer geographic datasets on the Web. The potential users are interested in buying the dataset. An exchange of geographic data is a transaction and involves transaction costs. Transaction costs include the cost of measuring what has been exchanged and the cost of protecting rights, plus policing and enforcing agreements. Our research on transaction costs is based on experiments in Sweden and Germany. We focus on the cost of data acquisition, the search for information about the data provider, and the quality and price of its data products. The experiments show that there is a difference if only one data provider exists or there are several different suppliers available. We conclude the paper with a description of the experiment, our first results and further research work.