A Theory of Pricing Private Data

Personal data has value to both its owner and to institutions who would like to analyze it. Privacy mechanisms protect the owner's data while releasing to analysts noisy versions of aggregate query results. But such strict protections of individual's data have not yet found wide use in practice. Instead, Internet companies, for example, commonly provide free services in return for valuable sensitive information from users, which they exploit and sometimes sell to third parties. As the awareness of the value of the personal data increases, so has the drive to compensate the end user for her private information. The idea of monetizing private data can improve over the narrower view of hiding private data, since it empowers individuals to control their data through financial means. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework for assigning prices to noisy query answers, as a function of their accuracy, and for dividing the price amongst data owners who deserve compensation for their loss of privacy. Our framework adopts and extends key principles from both differential privacy and query pricing in data markets. We identify essential properties of the price function and micro-payments, and characterize valid solutions.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figures. Best Paper Award, to appear in the 16th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), 201

Opt In versus Opt Out: A Free-Entry Analysis of Privacy Policies

There is much debate on how the flow of information between firms should be organized, and whether existing privacy laws should be amended.We offer a welfare comparison of the three main current policies towards consumer privacy - anonymity, opt in, and opt out - within a two-period model of localized competition.We show that when consumers find it too costly to opt in or opt out, privacy policies shape firms' ability to collect and use customer information, and affect their pricing strategy and entry decision differently.The free-entry analysis reveals that social welfare is non-monotonic in the degree of privacy protection.Opt out is the socially preferred privacy policy while opt in socially underperforms anonymity.Consumers never opt out and choose to opt in only when its cost is sufficiently low.Only when opting in is cost-free do the opt-in and opt-out privacy policies coincide.privacy;price discrimination;monopolistic competition;welfare

Privacy, Driving Data and Automobile Insurance: An Economic Analysis

With new technologies that enable insurers to electronically monitor vehicles and drivers, insurers should be able to price automobile insurance more accurately, creating individualized prices for consumers. The welfare effects of lower prices are straightforward, but we also consider that consumers have heterogeneous valuations of privacy that they may lose if they adopt the monitoring technologies. We examine the voluntary market adoption of these monitoring technologies and its effect on equilibrium prices and welfare. We find a welfare effect equal to the loss in privacy, but conclude that the overall effect is ambiguous without considering moral hazard.Insurance, Privacy

Opt In Versus Opt Out: A Free-Entry Analysis of Privacy Policies

There is much debate on how the flow of information between firms should be organized, and whether existing privacy laws should be amended. We offer a welfare comparison of the three main current policies towards consumer privacy — anonymity, opt in, and opt out — within a two-period model of localized competition. We show that when consumers find it too costly to opt in or opt out, privacy policies shape firms’ ability to collect and use customer information, and affect their pricing strategy and entry decision differently. The free-entry analysis reveals that social welfare is non-monotonic in the degree of privacy protection. Opt out is the socially preferred privacy policy while opt in socially underperforms anonymity. Consumers never opt out and choose to opt in only when its cost is sufficiently low. Only when opting in is cost-free do the opt-in and opt-out privacy policies coincide.privacy, price discrimination, monopolistic competition, welfare