The Effects of Personal Data Management on Competition and Welfare

Abstract：   

We consider a duopoly model in which consumers purchase products in two independent markets: one is for data collection, and another is for data application. In the data application market, each firm can offer personalized prices to its targeted customers and a uniform price to untargeted consumers. However, each firm's targeted customers can erase their data from the database to become untargeted consumers by incurring a fixed cost before the firms offer prices. We show that privacy management harms the total surplus, firms, and consumers, except for opt-out consumers in the data application market. Consumers' privacy management also intensifies competition in the data collection market, lowering the two-market profits and benefiting consumers in this market. We extend the model in several directions.

Speaker Biography：

主讲人从佳佳于2018年在香港大学获得博士学位，现任复旦大学管理学院应用经济学系的副教授。其研究方向为产业组织理论和应用微观经济学，主要关注企业并购、平台竞争策略、以及数据在产业经济中的作用等主题。研究成果发表于RAND Journal of Economics, Management Science, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization等期刊。