On the use of economic price theory to find the optimum levels of privacy and information utility in non-perturbative microdata anonymisation

Ideally, when microdata is anonymised, we should maximize both the level of privacy and the level information utility of a released microdata set. However, since privacy and information utility are conflicting requirements, it is difficult to find a good balance between the two goals. The objective and constraints of this optimization problem can be captured naturally with concepts from economic price theory. In this paper, we present an approach based on economic price theory for guiding the process of microdata anonymisation such that optimum levels of privacy and information utility are achieved.