Revisiting the Economics of Privacy: Population Statistics and Confidentiality Protection as Public Goods

This paper has been replaced with http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ldi/37. We consider the problem of the public release of statistical information about a population–explicitly accounting for the public-good properties of both data accuracy and privacy loss. We first consider the implications of adding the public-good component to recently published models of private data publication under differential privacy guarantees using a Vickery-Clark-Groves mechanism and a Lindahl mechanism. We show that data quality will be inefficiently under-supplied. Next, we develop a standard social planner’s problem using the technology set implied by (ε, δ)-differential privacy with (α, β)-accuracy for the Private Multiplicative Weights query release mechanism to study the properties of optimal provision of data accuracy and privacy loss when both are public goods. Using the production possibilities frontier implied by this technology, explicitly parameterized interdependent preferences, and the social welfare function, we display properties of the solution to the social planner’s problem. Our results directly quantify the optimal choice of data accuracy and privacy loss as functions of the technology and preference parameters. Some of these properties can be quantified using population statistics on marginal preferences and correlations between income, data accuracy preferences, and privacy loss preferences that are available from survey data. Our results show that government data custodians should publish more accurate statistics with weaker privacy guarantees than would occur with purely private data publishing. Our statistical results using the General Social Survey and the Cornell National Social Survey indicate that the welfare losses from under-providing data accuracy while over-providing privacy protection can be substantial

Final and Cumulative Annual Report for Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant G-2015-13903 “The Economics of Socially-Efficient Privacy and Confidentiality Management for Statistical Agencies”

Final and Cumulative Annual Report, finalized May 2019Goal: To study the economics of socially efficient protocols for managing research databases containing private information. Metrics 1. At least four peer-reviewed articles that are published in journals read by economists, statisticians, and other social scientists. 2. A library of socially efficient algorithms that other researchers can readily implement 3. A policy handbook or brief to inform key statistical agencies on managing the tradeoffs between enabling data access and maintaining privacy 4. At least one graduate equipped with unique research and computational skills.Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant G-2015-1390

The European Security Industry: A Research Agenda

The security industry can be defined, in the first instance, as the industry that produces the goods and services required to protect citizens from insecurity. Yet, this industry, as opposed to defence, has not been an area of intense research. Their boundaries are unclear and the industry is not well characterised. This paper analyses this knowledge gap and presents some ideas for a research agenda for this industry that could assist in unveiling the main features, the potential weaknesses and strengths, and the capability to solve the security needs of society in an efficient and effective way. The paper discusses a definition of this economic sector useful in setting its boundaries, and it briefly describes the main types of industries operating within the sector. It analyses methods for gathering information regarding the industry, customers, and other market agents. Finally, it outlines ways for assessing market performance in terms of the structure-conduct-performance paradigm.security industry, security market, terrorism and organised crime countermeasures, competition, market performance

Reasonable Expectations of Privacy and Novel Search Technologies: An Economic Approach

The “reasonable expectation of privacy” test, which defines the scope of constitutional protection from governmental privacy intrusions in both the United States and Canada, is notoriously indeterminate. This indeterminacy stems in large measure from the tendency of judges to think of privacy in non-instrumentalist terms. This “moral” approach to privacy is normatively questionable, and it does a poor job of identifying the circumstances in which privacy should prevail over countervailing interests, such as the deterrence of crime. In this paper, I develop an alternative, economically-informed approach to the reasonable expectation of privacy test. In contrast to the moral approach, which treats privacy as a fundamental right, the economic approach views it as a (normatively neutral) aspect of self-interest: the desire to conceal and control potentially damaging personal information. On this view, privacy should not be protected when its primary effect is to impede the optimal deterrence of crime. Legal protections against governmental surveillance, however, may in other cases enhance social welfare by encouraging productive transactions, diminishing the costs of non-legal privacy barriers, and limiting suboptimal policing practices, including discriminatory profiling and the enforcement of inefficient criminal prohibitions. Economics and public choice theory can also help to minimize decision-making error by predicting which legal actors – police, legislatures, or courts – are best placed to make optimal trade-offs between privacy and crime control. I first describe the United States and Canadian supreme courts’ reasonable expectation of privacy jurisprudence and canvass its chief inadequacy: the vagueness of the “public exposure” and “intimacy” doctrines that the courts have used to decide whether to regulate novel search technologies. I then outline the economic approach to the reasonable expectation of privacy test. Next, I apply this approach to two technologically advanced search tools: infrared imaging and location tracking. This analysis suggests that courts should recognize a reasonable expectation of privacy in the latter case, but not the former

Quantitative and Qualitative Evidence on Cuba\u27s Primary Health Care

Many scholars have lauded the Cuban primary health care system because the country has demonstrated a remarkable success in providing access to and improving the health of its population under punishing economic circumstances. While much of the evidence supporting this view has relied on quantitative research, more recent research with ethnographic components offers alternative perspectives of the Cuban health experience. The purpose of this capstone is to determine the extent to which there may be dissonance between quantitative and qualitative research. A review of the published literature reveals challenges for both patients and health workers. Issues discussed include the informal economy for health, diminishing income for physicians, constraints for patients, and medical internationalism. This capstone concludes that Cuba‘s primary health care system has been largely successful in meeting the health care needs of its population