We analyze the costs and benefits of using social image to foster virtuous behavior. A Principal seeks to motivate reputation-conscious agents to supply a public good. Each agent chooses how much to contribute based on his own mix of public-spiritedness, private signal about the value of the...

The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) is a model for restructuring primary care with a focus on improved access to care and clinical excellence. However, to date, the evidence on its effect on healthcare utilization and expenditures has been quite mixed. One possible reason for this may lie...

Utilizing a novel dataset from an online travel intermediary, we study the effects of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The opt-in requirement of GDPR resulted in 12.5% drop in the intermediary-observed consumers, but the remaining consumers are trackable for a longer period of...

This paper investigates whether larger quantities of historical data affect a firm's ability to maintain market share in Internet search. We study whether the length of time that search engines retained their server logs affected the apparent accuracy of subsequent searches. Our analysis...

'Notice and Choice' has been a mainstay of policies designed to safeguard consumer privacy. This paper investigates distortions in consumer behavior when faced with notice and choice which may limit the ability of consumers to safeguard their privacy using field experiment data from the MIT...

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in the European Union in May 2018. We study its short-run impact on investment in new and emerging technology firms. Our findings indicate negative post-GDPR effects on EU ventures, relative to their US counterparts. The negative...

Information and communication technology now enables firms to collect detailed and potentially intrusive data about their customers both easily and cheaply. This means that privacy concerns are no longer limited to government surveillance and public figures' private lives. The empirical...

What can we, as users of microdata, formally guarantee to the individuals (or firms) in our dataset, regarding their privacy? We retell a few stories, well-known in data-privacy circles, of failed anonymization attempts in publicly released datasets. We then provide a mostly informal...

The County Business Patterns data published by the US Census Bureau track employment by county and industry from 1946 to the present. Two features of the data limit their usefulness to researchers: (1) employment for the majority of county-industry cells is suppressed to protect confidentiality,...

Databases play a central role in evidence-based innovations in business, economics, social, and health sciences. In modern business and society, there are rapidly growing demands for constructing analytically valid databases that also are secure and protect sensitive information in order to meet...