Smart services and privacy, can we have both?
分析了用户隐私成本差异对智能服务供给策略的影响，发现供应商会按隐私敏感度细分市场，严格隐私保护可能牺牲服务质量，只有用户充分认可服务价值时隐私保护才有助于提升服务水平。
Smart services’ data-intensive nature means their convenience for users comes with privacy concerns. This poses challenges for the supply of smart services. This paper analyses the impact of user-differentiated privacy costs on smart service supply strategies. It also discusses the effects of privacy protections and data utilisation capabilities on the improvement of smart service levels. We find that providers tend to segment the market based on user privacy sensitivity to capture the maximum consumer surplus. Strict privacy protection requirements may cause providers to sacrifice service quality. Privacy protection is conducive to improving the level of smart services only when users fully recognise these services’ value. Interestingly, our study finds improvements in service levels by providers are driven by two factors. On the one hand, providers choose to improve their service levels to obtain more data and create more profits. On the other hand, to reduce the opportunity costs of early investments to develop services, providers need to improve their capabilities to utilise the value of data, ultimately leading to improved service levels. This study brings a new perspective to the supply of smart services and offers suggestions for how to resolve the contradiction between smart service use and privacy preservation.