Price discrimination with private and imperfect information

This paper investigates the competitive and welfare effects of information accuracy improvements in markets where firms can price discriminate after observing a private and noisy signal about a consumer’s brand preference. It shows that firms charge more to customers they believe have a brand preference for them, and that this price has an inverted-U shaped relationship with the signal’s accuracy. In contrast, the price charged after a disloyal signal has been observed falls as the signal’s accuracy rises. While industry profit and overall welfare fall monotonically as price discrimination is based on increasingly more accurate information, the reverse happens to consumer surplus.COMPETE; QREN; FEDER; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Innovative online platforms: Research opportunities

Economic growth in many countries is increasingly driven by successful startups that operate as online platforms. These success stories have motivated us to define and classify various online platforms according to their business models. This study discusses strategic and operational issues arising from five types of online platforms (resource sharing, matching, crowdsourcing, review, and crowdfunding) and presents some research opportunities for operations management scholars to explore

Do constructive trusts deter disloyalty?

Constructive trusts of disloyal fiduciary gain often are justified by the argument of deterrence. For there to be effective deterrence two conditions must be satisfied: first, potentially disloyal fiduciaries must be sufficiently informed, directly or indirectly, of the properties of the constructive trust; secondly, fiduciaries must respond by accurately weighing the costs/benefits of disloyalty and other options before choosing the option that maximises their self-interest. Typically one or both of these conditions will not be satisfied. Drawing upon insights from the behavioural sciences we find that fiduciaries contemplating disloyalty generally cannot be expected to be cognizant of the properties of the constructive trust therefore cannot be influenced by them. Even when known, such properties will not necessarily influence fiduciary behaviour due to the way well-informed fiduciaries are likely to perceive and process the risk their disloyalty will be detected. The deterrence gains generated by the recognition of a constructive trust therefore are likely to be negligible

Hacking into Federal Court: Employee Authorization Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Few would disagree that computers play an important role in modern United States society. However, many would be surprised to discover the modest amount of legislation governing computer use. Congress began addressing computer crime in 1984 by enacting the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The CFAA represented the first piece of federal legislation governing computer crimes and has undergone eight amendments to date, making it one of the most expansive criminal laws in the United States. In 1994, Congress added a civil provision opening the door for application of the statute in novel situations. Initially enacted to target crimes committed by hackers, the most common type of CFAA case in recent years involves claims brought against disloyal employees. The typical fact-pattern involves an employee who uses his work computer to misappropriate confidential or proprietary business information from his current employer to start a new business venture or join a competitor. Applying the CFAA to this common situation has resulted in a split of authority regarding the interpretation of authorization, an undefined predicate for liability under the statute. Some courts have construed the term narrowly, holding that an employee\u27s misuse or misappropriation of an employer\u27s business information is not without authorization so long as the employer has given the employee permission to access such information. Others have construed the term broadly, holding that an employer has a cause of action when an employee obtains business information with disloyal intent for the employee\u27s own benefit or that of a competitor, regardless of whether the employer granted permission to access the information. This Note examines the CFAA\u27s history and analyzes the benefits of seeking relief under the CFAA compared to alternative claims. It also discusses the judicial color given to the term authorization, looking at the rationales behind each approach and focusing on emerging trends in the employer-employee context. Additionally, it examines past Supreme Court cases in an effort to predict how the Supreme Court will ultimately resolve this issue. The Note concludes by proposing that the Supreme Court adopt a narrow interpretation of authorization, and hold that an employee does not violate the statute by acquiring interests adverse to those of his employer when the employee accesses information with his employer\u27s permission

Government Speech and the War on Terror

This Article examines how the government’s speech in the War on Terror can threaten free speech, equal protection, and due process values. It focuses primarily on the constitutional harms threatened by the government’s speech itself (what some call a form of “soft law”), rather than on situations in which the government’s speech may be evidence of a constitutionally impermissible motive for its “hard law” actions

Decision Support Systems

Decision support systems (DSS) have evolved over the past four decades from theoretical concepts into real world computerized applications. DSS architecture contains three key components: knowledge base, computerized model, and user interface. DSS simulate cognitive decision-making functions of humans based on artificial intelligence methodologies (including expert systems, data mining, machine learning, connectionism, logistical reasoning, etc.) in order to perform decision support functions. The applications of DSS cover many domains, ranging from aviation monitoring, transportation safety, clinical diagnosis, weather forecast, business management to internet search strategy. By combining knowledge bases with inference rules, DSS are able to provide suggestions to end users to improve decisions and outcomes. This book is written as a textbook so that it can be used in formal courses examining decision support systems. It may be used by both undergraduate and graduate students from diverse computer-related fields. It will also be of value to established professionals as a text for self-study or for reference

The Common Law of Cyber Trespass

Right now, if executives in California and Virginia each bribe a competitor’s disloyal employee to steal a trade secret from the competitor’s servers, under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Government can charge one executive but not the other. Courts decide these cases differently due to the widening circuit split over the CFAA term “without authorization.” Neither the Supreme Court nor Congress has shown interest in resolving the split over authorization. Even more concerning is the suggestion that they can’t resolve it; the statute addresses too many potential scenarios for a single definition to end all debate. Where legislation cannot solve the problem, we turn to the common law. Despite the new technologies involved, over centuries working with trespass law, society has confronted these issues before. Rather than reinvent the wheel as the courts have done thus far, we need only understand the lessons learned. Recent scholarship has endorsed trespass as a framework for resolving this split. But scholarship has not begun the work to apply principles and tests from trespass treatises and historical cases to CFAA fact patterns. This Article starts that process. It first uses trespass principles to resolve the current circuit split. It next applies trespass law to resolve common scenarios from CFAA litigation

The Surprising Virtues of Data Loyalty

Lawmakers in the United States and Europe are seriously considering imposing duties of data loyalty that implement ideas from privacy law scholarship, but critics claim such duties are unnecessary, unworkable, overly individualistic, and indeterminately vague. This paper takes those criticisms seriously, and its analysis of them reveals that duties of data loyalty have surprising virtues. Loyalty, it turns out, can support collective well-being by embracing privacy’s relational turn; it can be a powerful state of mind for reenergizing privacy reform; it prioritizes human values rather than potentially empty formalism; and it offers solutions that are flexible and clear rather than vague and indeterminate. We propose five contexts in which specific rules should supplement a general duty of data loyalty: collection, personalization, gatekeeping, influencing, and mediation. Loyalty can be a key policy tool with which to take on the related problems of information capitalism, platform power, and the use of personal data to manufacture consent to objectionable data practices. In fact, loyalty may well be the critical missing piece of the regulatory toolkit for privacy

Breaching and Entering: When Data Scraping Should Be a Federal Computer Hacking Crime

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is a federal statute designed to combat computer hacking. The Act proscribes accessing data without authorization. Federal circuits have interpreted “authorization” both broadly and narrowly, resulting in a circuit split. Whereas the First, Fifth, and Eleventh Circuits have held that misuse of computer access can constitute hacking under the CFAA, the Fourth and Ninth Circuits have held that scrapers must circumvent a code or technical barrier in order to satisfy the CFAA’s mens rea requirement. This note focuses on the conduct of data scrapers. Scrapers are computer programs that aggregate data from various websites in order to present the data to users in easily readable formats. Because scrapers can be both beneficial and harmful to the digital ecosystem, this note proposes that the term “authorization” should be construed narrowly in the context of scraping. As such, CFAA liability should only be triggered when scrapers are used to circumvent code barriers and harm the sources from which they collect data. Applying this code-based rule to authorization will align with the statute’s original purpose to combat computer fraud and will not unnecessarily expose beneficial scraper users to federal criminal liability