Related papers: Consumer Privacy and Serial Monopoly
Post-processing immunity is a fundamental property of differential privacy: it enables arbitrary data-independent transformations to differentially private outputs without affecting their privacy guarantees. Post-processing is routinely…
This article summarizes the field of consumer protection law, from its historical roots to the contemporary challenges of the digital age. It outlines the legal doctrines governing consumer deception and unfair trade practices, highlighting…
We consider a refinement of differential privacy --- per instance differential privacy (pDP), which captures the privacy of a specific individual with respect to a fixed data set. We show that this is a strict generalization of the standard…
Firms' algorithm development practices are often homogeneous. Whether firms train algorithms on similar data, aim at similar benchmarks, or rely on similar pre-trained models, the result is correlated predictions. We model the impact of…
Information is replicable in that it can be simultaneously consumed and sold to others. We study how resale affects a decentralized market for information. We show that even if the initial seller is an informational monopolist, she captures…
Due to the recent popularity of online social networks, coupled with people's propensity to disclose personal information in an effort to achieve certain gratifications, the problem of navigating the tradeoff between privacy and utility…
Trade-offs between privacy and cost are studied for a smart grid consumer, whose electricity consumption is monitored in almost real time by the utility provider (UP) through smart meter (SM) readings. It is assumed that an electrical…
A scheme that publishes aggregate information about sensitive data must resolve the trade-off between utility to information consumers and privacy of the database participants. Differential privacy is a well-established definition of…
Differential privacy (DP) considers a scenario, where an adversary has almost complete information about the entries of a database This worst-case assumption is likely to overestimate the privacy thread for an individual in real life.…
In social network markets, the act of consumer choice in these industries is governed not just by the set of incentives described by conventional consumer demand theory, but by the choices of others in which an individual's payoff is an…
The fundamental trade-off between privacy and utility remains an active area of research. Our contribution is motivated by two observations. First, privacy mechanisms developed for one-time data release cannot straightforwardly be extended…
In the context of nonlinear prices, the empirical evidence suggests that the consumers have cognitive biases represented in a limited understanding of nonlinear price structures, and they respond to some alternative perceptions of the…
Privacy-protected microdata are often the desired output of a differentially private algorithm since microdata is familiar and convenient for downstream users. However, there is a statistical price for this kind of convenience. We show that…
Consider an agent taking two successive decisions to maximize his expected utility under uncertainty. After his first decision, a signal is revealed that provides information about the state of nature. The observation of the signal allows…
What do pickles and trampolines have in common? In this paper we show that while purchases for these products may seem innocuous, they risk revealing clues about customers' personal attributes - in this case, their race. As online retail…
Supervised learning models have been increasingly used for making decisions about individuals in applications such as hiring, lending, and college admission. These models may inherit pre-existing biases from training datasets and…
A user's data is represented by a finite-valued random variable. Given a function of the data, a querier is required to recover, with at least a prescribed probability, the value of the function based on a query response provided by the…
The background to this paper is that in our world of massively increasing personal digital data any control over the data about me seems illusionary - informational privacy seems a lost cause. On the other hand, the production of this…
One of major considerations in an online business is customer privacy. Consumers are not interested in being monitored and identified by sellers. Some solutions are proposed to hide selection of the customer but in the payment phase, there…
An information theoretic privacy mechanism design problem for two scenarios is studied where the private data is either hidden or observable. In each scenario, privacy leakage constraints are considered using two different measures. In…