Advertisers use online customer data to target their marketing appeals. This has heightened consumers' privacy concerns, leading governments to pass laws designed to protect consumer privacy by restricting the use of data and by restricting online tracking techniques used by websites. We use the...

One of the new realities of advertising is that personal information can be used to ensure that advertising is only shown and designed for a select group of consumers who stand to gain most from this information. However, to gather the data used for targeting requires some degree of privacy...

Electronic medical records (EMRs) facilitate fast and accurate access to patient records, which could improve diagnosis and patient monitoring. Using a 12-year county-level panel, we find that a 10 percent increase in births that occur in hospitals with EMRs reduces neonatal mortality by 16...

This chapter summarizes the fundamental questions underlying the economics of privacy. It highlights the tension between the multifaceted concept of privacy as commonly used in policy debates and its conceptualization as part of a utility function. The chapter then sets out new challenges for...