Related papers: Privacy Can Arise Endogenously in an Economic Syst…

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…

We study a two-sided online data ecosystem comprised of an online platform, users on the platform, and downstream learners or data buyers. The learners can buy user data on the platform (to run a statistic or machine learning task).…

In repeated games, such as auctions, players rely on autonomous learning agents to choose their actions. We study settings in which players have their agents make monetary transfers to other agents during play at their own expense, in order…

We study the revenue-maximizing mechanism when a buyer's value evolves endogenously because of learning-by-consuming. A seller sells one unit of a divisible good, while the buyer relies on his private, rough valuation to choose his…

As the sociological theory of homophily suggests, people tend to interact with those of similar preferences. Motivated by this well-established phenomenon, today's online sellers, such as Amazon,~seek~to learn a new buyer's private…

The problem of analyzing the effect of privacy concerns on the behavior of selfish utility-maximizing agents has received much attention lately. Privacy concerns are often modeled by altering the utility functions of agents to consider also…

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…

I study a social learning model in which the object to learn is a strategic player's endogenous actions rather than an exogenous state. A patient seller faces a sequence of buyers and decides whether to build a reputation for supplying high…

We study dynamic reputation in a social-learning environment where only purchase decisions are observable. A long-lived seller posts a fixed price and chooses costly product quality in each period before interacting with short-lived buyers…

We initiate the study of markets for private data, though the lens of differential privacy. Although the purchase and sale of private data has already begun on a large scale, a theory of privacy as a commodity is missing. In this paper, we…

Traditional user profiling techniques rely on browsing history or purchase records to identify users' willingness to pay. This enables sellers to offer personalized prices to profiled users while charging only a uniform price to…

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…

Privacy is an essential issue in data trading markets. This work uses a mechanism design approach to study the optimal market model to economize the value of privacy of personal data, using differential privacy. The buyer uses a finite…

We consider a market of risky financial assets whose participants are an informed trader, a representative uninformed trader, and noisy liquidity providers. We prove the existence of a market-clearing equilibrium when the insider…

In settings like vaccination registries, individuals act after observing others, and the resulting public records can expose private information. We study privacy-preserving sequential learning, where agents add endogenous noise to their…

Recent work has constructed economic mechanisms that are both truthful and differentially private. In these mechanisms, privacy is treated separately from the truthfulness; it is not incorporated in players' utility functions (and doing so…

Internet tracking technologies and wearable electronics provide a vast amount of data to machine learning algorithms. This stock of data stands to increase with the developments of the internet of things and cyber-physical systems. Clearly,…

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…

An informed seller designs a dynamic mechanism to sell an experience good. The seller has partial information about the product match, which affects the buyer's private consumption experience. We characterize equilibrium mechanisms of this…

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…