The Value of Personal Information in Online Markets with Endogenous Privacy
研究了在消费者可付费保护隐私、企业用个人信息进行价格歧视的竞争市场中，隐私成本对价格、利润和消费者剩余的影响，发现双寡头竞争下企业利润随隐私成本下降，消费者剩余上升，并指出政策应更多关注排他性数据交易而非消费者隐私保护。
We investigate the effects of price discrimination on prices, profits, and consumer surplus when (a) at least one competing firm can use consumers’ private information to price discriminate yet (b) consumers can prevent such use by paying a “privacy cost.” Unlike a monopolist, competing duopolists do not always benefit from a higher privacy cost because each firm’s profit decreases—and consumer surplus increases—with that cost. Under such competition, the optimal strategy for an owner of consumer data that sells information in a single block is selling to only one firm, thereby maximizing the stakes for rival buyers. The resulting inefficiencies imply that policy makers should devote more attention to discouraging exclusivity deals and less to ensuring that consumers can easily protect their privacy. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2989 . This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.