Eleggere il parlamento : candidati, eletti ed elettori alle elezioni del Gran Consiglio ticinese del 2015

Cette étude se focalise sur le recrutement parlementaire dans le cas d’une élection cantonale helvétique d’importance primordiale. L’analyse porte sur les élections législatives cantonales tessinoises de 2015. Cette étude, qui se base sur une méthodologie quantitative, propose d’approfondir différents aspects: premièrement, le rapport entre les aspirants candidats et les partis politiques ; deuxièmement, les formes des campagnes électorales promues par les candidats, en particulier à travers le Web ; les caractéristiques sociographiques des candidats et des élus, ainsi que la convergence des opinions des élus et des candidats en relation avec l’opinion des électeurs. Couplée avec l’analyse du vote des citoyens (Mazzoleni et al. 2017), l’étude du recrutement parlementaire confirme comme ces élections relèvent d’un moment de transition crucial dans la politique tessinoise

The effects of personal information on competition: Consumer privacy and partial price discrimination

This article studies the effects of consumer information on the intensity of competition. In a two dimensional duopoly model of horizontal product differentiation, firms use consumer information to price discriminate. I contrast a full privacy and a no privacy benchmark with intermediate regimes in which the firms target consumers only partially. No privacy is traditionally detrimental to industry profits. Instead, I show that with partial privacy firms are always better-off with price discrimination: the relationship between information and profits is hump-shaped. Consumers prefer either no or full privacy in aggregate. However, even though this implies that privacy protection in digital markets should be either very hard or very easy, the effects of information on individual surplus are ambiguous: there are always winners and losers. When an upstream data seller holds partially informative data, an exclusive allocation arises. Instead, when data is fully informative, each competitor acquires consumer data but on a different dimension

Data, Competition, and Consumer Privacy in Digital Markets

In digital markets personal information is pervasively collected by firms. In the first chapter I study data ownership and product customization when there is exclusive access to non rival but excludable data about consumer preferences. I show that an incumbent firm does not have an incentive to sell an exclusively held dataset with a rival firm, but instead it has an incentive to trade a customizing technology with the other firm. In the second chapter I investigate the effects of consumer information on the intensity of competition. In a two dimensional model of product differentiation, firms use information on preferences to practice price discrimination. I contrast a full privacy and a no privacy benchmark with a regime in which firms are able to target consumers only partially. When data is partially informative, firms are always better-off with price discrimination and an exclusive access to user data is not necessarily a competition policy concern. From a consumer protection perspective, the policy recommendation is that the regulator should promote either no privacy or full privacy. In the third chapter I introduce a data broker that observes either only one or both dimensions of consumer information and sells this data to competing firms for price discrimination purposes. When the seller exogenously holds a partially informative dataset, an exclusive allocation arises. Instead, when the dataset held is fully informative, the data broker trades information non exclusively but each competitor acquires consumer data on a different dimension. When data collection is made endogenous, non exclusivity is robust if collection costs are not too high. The competition policy suggestion is that exclusivity should not be banned per se, but it is data differentiation in equilibrium that rises market power in competitive markets. Upstream competition is sufficient to ensure that both firms get access to consumer information