Valuing Intrinsic and Instrumental Preferences for Privacy
通过实验和结构模型，分离消费者隐私偏好的内在成分（对隐私的“品味”）和工具性成分（因数据泄露导致的预期经济损失），发现内在偏好均值虽小但异质性高，且消费者自选择行为偏离传统“低类型更愿隐藏”的假设。
I empirically separate two components in a consumer’s privacy preference. The intrinsic component is a “taste” for privacy, a utility primitive. The instrumental component comes from the consumer’s anticipated economic loss from revealing his private information to the firm and arises endogenously from a firm’s usage of consumer data. Combining an experiment and a structural model, I measure the revealed preferences separately for each component. Intrinsic preferences have seemingly small mean values, ranging from $0.14 to $2.37 per demographic variable. Meanwhile, they are highly heterogeneous across consumers and categories of data: The valuations of consumers at the right tail often exceed the firm’s valuation of consumer data. Consumers’ self-selection into data sharing depends on the respective magnitudes and correlation between the two preference components and often deviates from the “low types are more willing to hide” argument. Through counterfactual analysis, I show how this more nuanced selection pattern changes a firm’s inference from consumers’ privacy decisions and its data-buying strategy.