Related papers: Voluntary Disclosure and Personalized Pricing

Most companies' new business practices are based on customer data. These practices have raised privacy concerns because of the associated risks. Privacy laws require companies to gain customer consent before using their information, which…

We develop a simple framework to analyze how targeted persuasive advertising shapes market power and welfare. A designer flexibly manipulates the demand curve by influencing individual valuations at a cost. A monopolist prices against this…

We study the interplay of fairness, welfare, and equity considerations in personalized pricing based on customer features. Sellers are increasingly able to conduct price personalization based on predictive modeling of demand conditional on…

An online seller or platform is technically able to offer every consumer a different price for the same product, based on information it has about the customers. Such online price discrimination exacerbates concerns regarding the fairness…

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…

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…

Statistical agencies face a dual mandate to publish accurate statistics while protecting respondent privacy. Increasing privacy protection requires decreased accuracy. Recognizing this as a resource allocation problem, we propose an…

I study how to regulate firms' access to consumer data when a regulator faces non-Bayesian uncertainty about how firms will exploit the consumer's information to segment the market and set prices. I fully characterize all worst-case optimal…

Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…

A policymaker discloses public information to interacting agents who also acquire costly private information. More precise public information reduces the precision and cost of acquired private information. Considering this effect, what…

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…

Many online marketplaces personalize prices based on consumer attributes. Since these prices are private, consumers may be unaware that they have spent more on a good than the lowest possible price, and cannot easily take action to pay…

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…

There is an increased sensitivity by people about how companies collect information about them, and how this information is packaged, used and sold. This perceived lack of control is highlighted by the helplessness of users of various…

We consider the problem of how to regulate an oligopoly when firms have private information about their costs. In the environment, consumers make discrete choices over goods, and minimal structure is placed on the manner in which firms…

While the entire field of privacy preserving data analytics is focused on the privacy-utility tradeoff, recent work has shown that privacy preserving data publishing can introduce different levels of utility across different population…

A monopolist faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social network. In the network, the monopolist offers rewards to informed consumers (influencers) conditional on informing uninformed…

Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by…

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…

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…