Related papers: Voluntary Disclosure and Personalized Pricing
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 examine the implications of consumer privacy when preferences today depend upon past consumption choices, and consumers shop from different sellers in each period. Although consumers are ex ante identical, their initial consumption…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
Extensive research shows that consumers are generally averse to price discrimination. However, instruments of differential pricing can benefit consumer surplus and alleviate inequity through targeted price discounts. This paper examines how…
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…
This paper examines competitive information disclosure in search markets with a mix of savvy consumers, who search costlessly, and inexperienced consumers, who face positive search costs. Savvy consumers incentivize truthful disclosure;…
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…
Personalized pricing is a business strategy to charge different prices to individual consumers based on their characteristics and behaviors. It has become common practice in many industries nowadays due to the availability of a growing…
We study price regulation for a monopolist operating in networked markets with demand spillovers. Achieving efficiency requires price reductions proportional to consumers' Katz-Bonacich centralities, which generally cannot be implemented by…
Information frictions can harm the welfare of participants in two-sided matching markets. Consider a centralized admission, where colleges cannot observe students' preparedness for success in a particular major or degree program. Colleges…