There is much debate on how the flow of information between firms should be organized, and whether existing privacy laws should be amended. We offer a welfare comparison of the three main current policies towards consumer privacy - anonymity, opt in, and opt out - within a two-period model of...

This chapter first describes the standard economic analysis of privacy, data protection and surveillance, looking at the costs and benefits to different parties and the incentives each therefore has, as well as the aggregate social welfare impacts of their decisions. It then considers the market...

We study markets for sensitive personal information. An agent wants to communicate with another party but any revealed information can be intercepted and sold to a third party whose reaction harms the agent. The market for information induces an adverse sorting effect, allocating the information...

We study markets for sensitive personal information. An agent wants to communicate with another party but any revealed information can be intercepted and sold to a third party whose reaction harms the agent. The market for information induces an adverse sorting effect, allocating the information...

This chapter reviews economic analyses of privacy. We begin by scrutinizing the "free market" critique of privacy regulation. Welfare may be non-monotone in the quantity of information, hence there may be excessive incentive to collect information. This result applies to both non-productive and...

This paper analyzes consumers' privacy choice concerning their data and firms' ensuing pricing strategies. Consumers decide whether to reveal private information in form of cookies. We study this endogenous decision in a duopoly model with behavior-based pricing and conduct an experiment to test...

Two duopolists compete in price on the market for a homogeneous product. They can ‘profile’ consumers, i.e., identify their valuations with some probability. If both firms can profile consumers but with different abilities, then they achieve positive expected profits at equilibrium. This...

This paper analyzes consumers' privacy choice concerning their private data and firms' ensuing pricing strategy. The General Data Protection Regulation passed by the European Union in May 2018 allows consumers to decide whether to reveal private information in the form of cookies to an online...

This paper discusses the troubled relationship between contemporary advertising technology (adtech) systems, in particular systems of real-time bidding (RTB, also known as programmatic advertising) underpinning much behavioural targeting on the web and through mobile applications. This paper...

A monopolist can use a 'tracking' technology that allows it to identify a consumer's willingness to pay with some probability. Consumers can counteract tracking by acquiring a 'hiding' technology. We show in this note that consumers are collectively better off when this hiding technology is not...