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Data is increasingly being bought and sold online, and Web-based marketplace services have emerged to facilitate these activities. However, current mechanisms for pricing data are very simple: buyers can choose only from a set of explicit views, each with a specific price. In this article, we propose a framework for pricing data on the Internet that, given the price of a few views, allows the price of any query to be derived automatically. We call this capability query-based pricing. We first identify two important properties that the pricing function must satisfy, the arbitrage-free and discount-free properties. Then, we prove that there exists a unique function that satisfies these properties and extends the seller's explicit prices to all queries. Central to our framework is the notion of query determinacy, and in particular instance-based determinacy: we present several results regarding the complexity and properties of it.

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