Related papers: Consumer Privacy and Serial Monopoly

Iterative machine learning algorithms used to power recommender systems often change people's preferences by trying to learn them. Further a recommender can better predict what a user will do by making its users more predictable. Some…

Consumer regret is a widespread post-purchase emotion that significantly impacts satisfaction, product returns, complaint behavior, and customer loyalty. Despite its prevalence, there is a limited understanding of why certain consumers…

Very recently, we are witnessing the emergence of a number of start-ups that enables individuals to sell their private data directly to brokers and businesses. While this new paradigm may shift the balance of power between individuals and…

A marketplace is defined where the private data of suppliers (e.g., prosumers) are protected, so that neither their identity nor their level of stock is made known to end customers, while they can sell their products at a reduced price. A…

The existing studies on consumer search agree that consumers are worse-off when they do not observe sellers' production marginal cost than when they do. In this paper we challenge this conclusion. Employing a canonical model of simultaneous…

In continuous-choice settings, consumers decide not only on whether to purchase a product, but also on how much to purchase. Thus, firms optimize a full price schedule rather than a single price point. This paper provides a methodology to…

It has been widely understood that differential privacy (DP) can guarantee rigorous privacy against adversaries with arbitrary prior knowledge. However, recent studies demonstrate that this may not be true for correlated data, and indicate…

How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…

In recommendation settings, there is an apparent trade-off between the goals of accuracy (to recommend items a user is most likely to want) and diversity (to recommend items representing a range of categories). As such, real-world…

People learn about opportunities and actions by observing the experiences of their friends. We model how homophily -- the tendency to associate with similar others -- affects both the endogenous quality and diversity of the information…

In collaborative recommendation systems, privacy may be compromised, as users' opinions are used to generate recommendations for others. In this paper, we consider an online collaborative recommendation system, and we measure users' privacy…

In markets where algorithmic data processing is increasingly prevalent, recommendation algorithms can substantially affect trade and welfare. We consider a setting in which an algorithm recommends a product based on its value to the buyer…

We consider a user releasing her data containing some personal information in return of a service. We model user's personal information as two correlated random variables, one of them, called the secret variable, is to be kept private,…

We all have preferences when multiple choices are available. If we insist on satisfying our preferences only, we may suffer a loss due to conflicts with other people's identical selections. Such a case applies when the choice cannot be…

Personalisation refers to the catering of online services to match consumer's interests. In order to provide personalised service, companies gather data on the consumer. In this situation, consumers must navigate a trade-off when they want…

A Private Repetition algorithm takes as input a differentially private algorithm with constant success probability and boosts it to one that succeeds with high probability. These algorithms are closely related to private metaselection…

We study market interactions in which buyers are allowed to credibly reveal partial information about their types to the seller. Previous recent work has studied the special case of one buyer and one good, showing that such communication…

This paper studies ranking policies in a stylized trial-offer marketplace model, in which a single firm offers products and has consumers with heterogeneous preferences. Consumer trials are influenced by past purchases and the ranking of…

We study a market for private data in which a data analyst publicly releases a statistic over a database of private information. Individuals that own the data incur a cost for their loss of privacy proportional to the differential privacy…

We analyze a coupled anonymized dataset collecting the mobile phone communication and bank transactions history of a large number of individuals. After mapping the social structure and introducing indicators of socioeconomic status,…