Related papers: Consumer Privacy and Serial Monopoly
Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…
This paper initiates the study of the testable implications of choice data in settings where agents have privacy preferences. We adapt the standard conceptualization of consumer choice theory to a situation where the consumer is aware of,…
We study price-discrimination games between buyers and a seller where privacy arises endogenously--that is, utility maximization yields equilibrium strategies where privacy occurs naturally. In this game, buyers with a high valuation for a…
We study how privacy technologies affect user and advertiser behavior in a simple economic model of targeted advertising. In our model, a consumer first decides whether or not to buy a good, and then an advertiser chooses an advertisement…
The question we raise through this paper is: Is it economically feasible to trade consumer personal information with their formal consent (permission) and in return provide them incentives (monetary or otherwise)?. In view of (a) the…
We study competition between firms that contract with consumers before the consumers fully learn their product preferences. In a Hotelling duopoly, firms screen consumers by offering menus of option contracts. We characterize the unique…
Consumers value keeping some information about them private from potential marketers. E-commerce dramatically increases the potential for marketers to accumulate otherwise private information about potential customers. Online marketers…
Product personalization opens the door to price discrimination. A rich product line allows firms to better tailor products to consumers' tastes, but the mere choice of a product carries valuable information about consumers that can be…
This paper studies optimal mechanisms for collecting and trading data. Consumers benefit from revealing information about their tastes to a service provider because this improves the service. However, the information is also valuable to a…
We study a producer's problem of selling a product to a continuum of privacy-conscious consumers, where the producer can implement third-degree price discrimination, offering different prices to different market segments. We consider a…
We study a two-sided online data ecosystem comprised of an online platform, users on the platform, and downstream learners or data buyers. The learners can buy user data on the platform (to run a statistic or machine learning task).…
A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination…
A data intermediary acquires signals from individual consumers regarding their preferences. The intermediary resells the information in a product market wherein firms and consumers tailor their choices to the demand data. The social…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…
As the sociological theory of homophily suggests, people tend to interact with those of similar preferences. Motivated by this well-established phenomenon, today's online sellers, such as Amazon,~seek~to learn a new buyer's private…
This paper investigates third-degree price discrimination under endogenous market segmentation. Segmenting a market requires access to information about consumers, and this information comes with a cost. I explore the trade-offs between the…
We study how market segmentation affects consumers when a monopolist can adjust both prices and product qualities across segments, engaging in second- and third-degree price discrimination simultaneously. We characterize the…
We study how a monopolist's use of consumer data for price discrimination affects welfare. To answer this question, we develop a model of market segmentation subject to residual uncertainty. We fully characterize when data usage…
We study the effects of data sharing between firms on prices, profits, and consumer welfare. Although indiscriminate sharing of consumer data decreases firm profits due to the subsequent increase in competition, selective sharing can be…
A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. The seller uses information to price discriminate the buyer. A designer offers a mechanism that provides the seller with additional information…