Related papers: Consumer Privacy and Serial Monopoly
This paper analyzes the impact of peer effects on electricity consumption of a network of rational, utility-maximizing users. Users derive utility from consuming electricity as well as consuming less energy than their neighbors. However, a…
We analyze digital markets where a monopolist platform uses data to match multiproduct sellers with heterogeneous consumers who can purchase both on and off the platform. The platform sells targeted ads to sellers that recommend their…
In many shopping scenarios, e.g., in online shopping, customers have a large menu of options to choose from. However, most of the buyers do not browse all the options and make decision after considering only a small part of the menu. To…
We build an endogenous growth model with consumer-generated data as a new key factor for knowledge accumulation. Consumers balance between providing data for profit and potential privacy infringement. Intermediate good producers use data to…
The design of privacy mechanisms for two scenarios is studied where the private data is hidden or observable. In the first scenario, an agent observes useful data $Y$, which is correlated with private data $X$, and wants to disclose the…
We study the consumption behaviour of an asymmetric network of heterogeneous agents in the framework of discrete choice models with stochastic decision rules. We assume that the interactions among agents are uniquely specified by their…
We study the optimal pricing strategy of a monopolist selling homogeneous goods to customers over multiple periods. The customers choose their time of purchase to maximize their payoff that depends on their valuation of the product, the…
The tension between persuasion and privacy preservation is common in real-world settings. Online platforms should protect the privacy of web users whose data they collect, even as they seek to disclose information about these data to…
This paper analyzes the strategic interactions between a profit-maximizing monopolist and a free, capacity-constrained public option. By restricting its own supply, the monopolist intentionally congests the public option and induces…
As a firm varies the price of a product, consumers exhibit reference effects, making purchase decisions based not only on the prevailing price but also the product's price history. We consider the problem of learning such behavioral…
In a technical treatment, this article establishes the necessity of transparent privacy for drawing unbiased statistical inference for a wide range of scientific questions. Transparency is a distinct feature enjoyed by differential privacy:…
We analyze the value to e-commerce website operators of offering privacy options to users, e.g., of allowing users to opt out of ad targeting. In particular, we assume that site operators have some control over the cost that a privacy…
Taking online decisions is a part of everyday life. Think of buying a house, parking a car or taking part in an auction. We often take those decisions publicly, which may breach our privacy - a party observing our choices may learn a lot…
We consider hundreds of thousands of individual economic transactions to ask: how predictable are consumers in their merchant visitation patterns? Our results suggest that, in the long-run, much of our seemingly elective activity is…
Users worldwide access massive amounts of curated data in the form of rankings on a daily basis. The societal impact of this ease of access has been studied and work has been done to propose and enforce various notions of fairness in…
Strategic information is valuable either by remaining private (for instance if it is sensitive) or, on the other hand, by being used publicly to increase some utility. These two objectives are antagonistic and leaking this information might…
A monopolist sells goods with possibly a characteristic consumers dislike (for instance, he sells random goods to risk averse agents), which does not affect the production costs. We investigate the question whether using undesirable goods…
Opinion polls suggest that the public value their privacy, with majorities calling for greater control of their data. However, individuals continue to use online services which place their personal information at risk, comprising a Privacy…
While users claim to be concerned about privacy, often they do little to protect their privacy in their online actions. One prominent explanation for this "privacy paradox" is that when an individual shares her data, it is not just her…
Differential privacy is becoming a gold standard for privacy research; it offers a guaranteed bound on loss of privacy due to release of query results, even under worst-case assumptions. The theory of differential privacy is an active…