IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cla/levarc/661465000000000298.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Online Privacy and Price Discrimination

Author

Listed:
  • Curtis R. Taylor
  • Vincent Conitzer
  • Liad Wagman

Abstract

When a firm is able to recognize its previous customers, it may use information about their purchase histories to price discriminate. We analyze a model with a monopolist and a continuum of heterogeneous consumers, where consumers are able to maintain their anonymity and avoid being identified as past customers, possibly at an (exogenous) cost. When consumers can costlessly maintain their anonymity, they all individually choose to do so, which paradoxically results in the highest profit for the firm. Increasing the cost of anonymity can benefit consumers, but only up to a point, after which the effect is reversed.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Curtis R. Taylor & Vincent Conitzer & Liad Wagman, 2010. "Online Privacy and Price Discrimination," Levine's Working Paper Archive 661465000000000298, David K. Levine.
    • Handle: RePEc:cla:levarc:661465000000000298
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.dklevine.com/archive/refs4661465000000000298.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. J. Miguel Villas-Boas, 1999. "Dynamic Competition with Customer Recognition," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 30(4), pages 604-631, Winter.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kummer, Michael & Schulte, Patrick, 2014. "Money and privacy: Android market evidence," ZEW Discussion Papers 14-131, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    2. Michael Kummer & Patrick Schulte, 2019. "When Private Information Settles the Bill: Money and Privacy in Google’s Market for Smartphone Applications," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(8), pages 3470-3494, August.
    3. Arieh Gavious & Ella Segev, 2017. "Price Discrimination Based on Buyers’ Purchase History," Dynamic Games and Applications, Springer, vol. 7(2), pages 229-265, June.
    4. Kesler, Reinhold & Kummer, Michael E. & Schulte, Patrick, 2017. "Mobile applications and access to private data: The supply side of the Android ecosystem," ZEW Discussion Papers 17-075, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bita Hajihashemi & Amin Sayedi & Jeffrey D. Shulman, 2022. "The Perils of Personalized Pricing with Network Effects," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 41(3), pages 477-500, May.
    2. Xujin Pu & Huanzhen Zhang, 2016. "Voluntary Certification of Agricultural Products in Competitive Markets: The Consideration of Boundedly Rational Consumers," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 8(9), pages 1-13, September.
    3. Marcus Asplund & Rickard Eriksson & Niklas Strand, 2008. "Price Discrimination In Oligopoly: Evidence From Regional Newspapers," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 56(2), pages 333-346, June.
    4. Li, Krista J. & Zhang, Jianqiang, 2021. "How does customer recognition affect service provision?," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 900-914.
    5. Ibrahim Mohammed & Basak Denizci Guillet & Rob Law & Wassiuw Abdul Rahaman, 2021. "Predicting the direction of dynamic price adjustment in the Hong Kong hotel industry," Tourism Economics, , vol. 27(2), pages 346-364, March.
    6. Bernard Caillaud & Romain de Nijs, 2011. "Strategic loyalty reward in dynamic price Discrimination," Working Papers halshs-00622291, HAL.
    7. Navdeep S. Sahni & Dan Zou & Pradeep K. Chintagunta, 2017. "Do Targeted Discount Offers Serve as Advertising? Evidence from 70 Field Experiments," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(8), pages 2688-2705, August.
    8. Sumit Shrivastav, 2021. "Price discrimination with imperfect consumer recognition," Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai Working Papers 2021-017, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India.
    9. Stole, Lars A., 2007. "Price Discrimination and Competition," Handbook of Industrial Organization, in: Mark Armstrong & Robert Porter (ed.), Handbook of Industrial Organization, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 34, pages 2221-2299, Elsevier.
    10. J Bouckaert & Hans Degryse, 2006. "Opt in versus Opt out: a free-entry analysis of privacy policies," Working Papers Department of Accountancy, Finance and Insurance (AFI), Leuven 500204, KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Accountancy, Finance and Insurance (AFI), Leuven.
    11. Elias Carroni, 2018. "Behaviour-based price discrimination with cross-group externalities," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 125(2), pages 137-157, October.
    12. Rosa-Branca Esteves & Sofia Cerqueira, "undated". "Behaviour-Based Price Discrimination under Advertising and Imperfectly Informed Consumers," NIPE Working Papers 08/2014, NIPE - Universidade do Minho.
    13. Alessandro Acquisti & Hal R. Varian, 2005. "Conditioning Prices on Purchase History," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 24(3), pages 367-381, May.
    14. Fay, Scott, 2008. "Selling an opaque product through an intermediary: The case of disguising one's product," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 84(1), pages 59-75.
    15. Alessandro Bonatti & Gonzalo Cisternas, 2020. "Consumer Scores and Price Discrimination," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 87(2), pages 750-791.
    16. Chen, Yuxin & Zhang, Z. John, 2009. "Dynamic targeted pricing with strategic consumers," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 27(1), pages 43-50, January.
    17. Jungju Yu, 2021. "A Model of Brand Architecture Choice: A House of Brands vs. A Branded House," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 40(1), pages 147-167, January.
    18. Shaohua Chen & Guomin Li, 2024. "Competition between New Energy and Fuel Vehicles with Behavior-Based Pricing Strategies When Considering Environmental Concerns and Green Innovation," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(10), pages 1-34, May.
    19. Didier Laussel & Ngo Van Long & Joana Resende, 2023. "Profit Effects of Consumers’ Identity Management: A Dynamic Model," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(6), pages 3602-3615, June.
    20. Lynne Pepall & Daniel Richards, 2021. "Targeted Value-Enhancing Advertising and Price Competition," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 59(3), pages 443-459, November.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • L1 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance
    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cla:levarc:661465000000000298. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: David K. Levine (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.dklevine.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.