We analyze platform competition where user data is collected to improve adtargeting. Considering that users incur … privacy costs, we show that the equilibrium level of data provision is distorted and can be inefficiently high or low: if … overall competition is weak or if targeting benefits are low, too much private data is collected, and vice-versa. Further, we …

by workers. Using data on 4,771 freelancers working on Upwork.com, the world’s leading freelancing website, we compare …

classical consumers, there is a share of data-sensitive consumers who incur a privacy cost if their purchase reveals information … mechanism and a privacy option, targeting, respectively, classical and data-sensitive consumers. We show that a privacy … mechanism is optimal if privacy costs are large and that it yields classical consumers a higher utility than data …