Related papers: Consumer Privacy and Serial Monopoly
We use decision theory to compare variants of differential privacy from the perspective of prospective study participants. We posit the existence of a preference ordering on the set of potential consequences that study participants can…
Data regulations increasingly enable consumers to switch among market segments, making segmentation an endogenous outcome of strategic interaction. We study a model in which consumers choose segments before a monopolist sets…
Privacy is an essential issue in data trading markets. This work uses a mechanism design approach to study the optimal market model to economize the value of privacy of personal data, using differential privacy. The buyer uses a finite…
Economic institutions often influence market outcomes not by directly controlling sellers' menus, but by shaping the market composition sellers face. We study the welfare effects of this upstream choice in a monopoly screening model. An…
We consider situations where consumers are aware that a statistical model determines the price of a product based on their observed behavior. Using a novel experiment varying the context similarity between participant data and a product, we…
We investigate the relationship between product offerings, information dissemination, and consumer decision-making in a monopolistic screening environment in which consumers lack information about their valuation of quality-differentiated…
This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category, but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer's utility is additive in…
We develop a continuous-time peer-effect discrete choice model where peers that affect the preferences of a given agent are randomly selected based on their previous choices. We characterize the equilibrium behavior and study the empirical…
We study the costs and benefits of selling data to a competitor. Although selling all consumers' data may decrease total firm profits, there exist other selling mechanisms -- in which only some consumers' data is sold -- that render both…
Consumers in many markets are uncertain about firms' qualities and costs, so buy based on both the price and the quality inferred from it. Optimal pricing depends on consumer heterogeneity only when firms with higher quality have higher…
This paper argues that data of strategic individuals with heterogeneous privacy valuations in a distributed online social network (e.g., Facebook) will be under-priced, if traded in a monopoly buyer setting, and will lead to diminishing…
Every time the customer (individual or company) has to release personal information to its service provider (e.g., an online store or a cloud computing provider), it faces a trade-off between the benefits gained (enhanced or cheaper…
The prevalence of e-commerce has made detailed customers' personal information readily accessible to retailers, and this information has been widely used in pricing decisions. When involving personalized information, how to protect the…
We study the costs and benefits of selling data to a competitor. Although selling all consumers' data may decrease total firm profits, there exist other selling mechanisms -- in which only some consumers' data is sold -- that render both…
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…
We study privacy-utility trade-offs where users share privacy-correlated useful information with a service provider to obtain some utility. The service provider is adversarial in the sense that it can infer the users' private information…
We explore a model of duopolistic competition in which consumers learn about the fit of each competitor's product. In equilibrium, consumers comparison shop: they learn only about the relative values of the products. When information is…
Fashion preference is a fuzzy concept that depends on customer taste, prevailing norms in fashion product/style, henceforth used interchangeably, and a customer's perception of utility or fashionability, yet fashion e-retail relies on…
To analyze the privacy guarantee of personal data in a database that is subject to queries it is necessary to model the prior knowledge of a possible attacker. Differential privacy considers a worst-case scenario where he knows almost…
Suppliers (including companies and individual prosumers) may wish to protect their private information when selling items they have in stock. A market is envisaged where private information can be protected through the use of differential…