Consumers' privacy choices in the era of big data
研究了在卖家能精准了解消费者偏好、近乎完美价格歧视的背景下，策略性不强的消费者如何在直接渠道和匿名渠道之间权衡，为消费者隐私选择提供了微观基础。
Recent progress in information technologies provides sellers with detailed knowledge about consumers' preferences, approaching perfect price discrimination in the limit. We construct a model where consumers with less strategic sophistication than the seller's pricing algorithm face a trade-off when buying. They choose between a direct, transaction cost-free sales channel and a privacy-protecting, but costly, anonymous channel. We show that the anonymous channel is used even in the absence of an explicit taste for privacy if consumers are not too strategically sophisticated. This provides a micro-foundation for consumers' privacy choices. Some consumers benefit but others suffer from their anonymization.