Infracompetitive Privacy

One of the chief anticompetitive effects of modern business lies in antitrust’s blind spot. Platform-based companies (“platforms”) have innovated a business model whereby they offer consumers “free and low-priced services in exchange for their personal information. With this data, platforms can design products, target consumers, and sell such information to third parties. The problem is that platforms can inflict greater costs on users and markets in the form of lost privacy than efficiencies generated from their low prices. Consumers, as examples, spend billions of dollars annually to remedy privacy breaches and, alarmingly, participate unwittingly in experiments designed to manipulate their behaviors, compromising human agency. But because antitrust law uses consumer prices to measure welfare, platforms and privacy injuries have avoided antitrust scrutiny. We show that insufficient competition enables platforms to capture the economic benefits of data while externalizing the costs of protecting it. As we find, consumers demand privacy yet firms in monopolized markets have powerful incentives to shift the costs of protecting privacy onto society. To reduce the rate of privacy breaches, we show that increasing competition would 1) allow users to punish offending firms, 2) disseminate information about the true costs of privacy, and 3) introduce more secure services into the market. As such, because monopoly power encourages firms to disregard the privacy demands of users, antitrust must evolve to recognize that the costs of inadequate privacy can degrade consumer welfare more than artificially high prices

Narrative approach to understand people's comprehension of acquaintance rape: The role of Sex Role Stereotyping

One of the most unreported crimes is acquaintance rape. This may be the result of people's understanding of what rape is because of their rape script and their stereotypes of victim characteristics. These judgements may be moderated by sex role stereotyping (SRS). We utilised a narrative approach to understand low and high SRS participants' rape scripts. Young-adult participants described what they believed a typical rape was, followed by describing an acquaintance rape and then what they believed the stereotypical victim of each crime would be. A narrative analysis was conducted on the data. We found that the blitz script is still held by 44% of low SRS and 47% of high SRS people despite 90% of rapes being committed by an acquaintance. While acquaintance rape scripts existed, the emotional imagery and content of these depended on participants level of SRS. Stereotypical victim characteristics also depended on SRS: those with high SRS were more likely to endorse rape myth ideals in describing victims than those with low SRS. These results have implications for educating people about what rape is so that victims might feel more confident in reporting rape

Infracompetitive Privacy

One of the chief anticompetitive effects of modern business lies in antitrust’s blind spot. Platform-based companies (“platforms”) have innovated a business model whereby they offer consumers “free and low-priced services in exchange for their personal information. With this data, platforms can design products, target consumers, and sell such information to third parties. The problem is that platforms can inflict greater costs on users and markets in the form of lost privacy than efficiencies generated from their low prices. Consumers, as examples, spend billions of dollars annually to remedy privacy breaches and, alarmingly, participate unwittingly in experiments designed to manipulate their behaviors, compromising human agency. But because antitrust law uses consumer prices to measure welfare, platforms and privacy injuries have avoided antitrust scrutiny. We show that insufficient competition enables platforms to capture the economic benefits of data while externalizing the costs of protecting it. As we find, consumers demand privacy yet firms in monopolized markets have powerful incentives to shift the costs of protecting privacy onto society. To reduce the rate of privacy breaches, we show that increasing competition would 1) allow users to punish offending firms, 2) disseminate information about the true costs of privacy, and 3) introduce more secure services into the market. As such, because monopoly power encourages firms to disregard the privacy demands of users, antitrust must evolve to recognize that the costs of inadequate privacy can degrade consumer welfare more than artificially high prices

The Role of Women Entrepreneurs in Rebuilding a Nation: The Rwandan Model, in Music, Business and Peacebuilding (Constance Cook Glen & Timothy L. Fort eds., 2021)

Business schools are placing more emphasis on the role of business in society. Top business school accreditors are shifting to mandating that schools teach their students about the social impact of business, including AACSB standards to require the incorporation of business impact on society into all elements of accredited institutions. Researchers are also increasingly focused on issues related to sustainability, but in particular to business and peace as a field. A strong strain of scholarship argues that ethics is nurtured by emotions and through aesthetic quests for moral excellence. The arts (and music as shown specifically in this book) can be a resource to nudge positive emotions in the direction toward ethical behavior and, logically, then toward peace. Business provides a model for positive interactions that not only foster long-term successful business but also incrementally influences society. This book provides an opportunity for integration and recognition of how music (and other art forms) can further encourage business toward the direction of peace while business provides a platform for the dissemination and modeling of the positive capabilities of music toward the aims of peace in the world today.https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/fac_books/1162/thumbnail.jp