Decision Tree Analysis for Estimating the Costs and Benefits of Disclosing Data

The public expects government institutions to open their data to enable society to reap the benefits of these data. However, governments are often reluctant to disclose their data due to possible disadvantages. These disadvantages, at the same time, can be circumstances by processing the data before disclosing. Investments are needed to be able to pre-process a dataset. Hence, a trade-off between the benefits and cost of opening data needs to be made. Decisions to disclose are often made based on binary options like “open” or “closed” the data, whereas also parts of a dataset can be opened or only pre-processed data. The objective of this study is to develop a decision tree analysis in open data (DTOD) to estimate the costs and benefits of disclosing data using a DTA approach. Experts’ judgment is used to quantify the pay-offs of possible consequences of the costs and benefits and to estimate the chance of occurrence. The result shows that for non-trivial decisions the DTOD helps, as it allows the creation of decision structures to show alternatives ways of opening data and the benefits and disadvantages of each alternative.