A Theory of the Effects of Privacy
基于个人收益函数相对于市场信念的凹凸性，提出隐私价值理论，并应用于产品选择、价格歧视、数据泄露和健康保险等场景，对政策制定者和企业有参考价值。
The growth of information technologies has intensified concerns about individual privacy and highlighted the importance of consumer privacy rights. At the same time, these technologies enable significant personalization of communications and offerings. We develop a theory of the effects of privacy based on the concavity of an individual’s derived payoff function with respect to market beliefs: When this function is concave, privacy is valuable. We identify market conditions that lead to concavity or convexity in the derived payoff function. The framework is applied to contexts such as product choice, price discrimination, data breaches, and health insurance. This paper was accepted by Raphael Thomadsen, marketing. Funding: A. Bonatti acknowledges financial support through the National Science Foundation [Grant SES-1948692]. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.05354 .