Information and communication technology now enables firms to collect detailed and potentially intrusive data about their customers both easily and cheaply. This means that privacy concerns are no longer limited to government surveillance and public figures' private lives. The empirical...

What can we, as users of microdata, formally guarantee to the individuals (or firms) in our dataset, regarding their privacy? We retell a few stories, well-known in data-privacy circles, of failed anonymization attempts in publicly released datasets. We then provide a mostly informal...

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in the European Union in May 2018. We study its short-run impact on investment in new and emerging technology firms. Our findings indicate negative post-GDPR effects on EU ventures, relative to their US counterparts. The negative...

The Internet comprises thousands of independently operated networks, interconnected using bilaterally negotiated data exchange agreements. The European Union (EU)'s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes strict restrictions on handling of personal data of European Economic Area (EEA)...

We analyze the costs and benefits of using social image to foster virtuous behavior. A Principal seeks to motivate reputation-conscious agents to supply a public good. Each agent chooses how much to contribute based on his own mix of public-spiritedness, private signal about the value of the...

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) – a general purpose technology affecting many industries - has been focused on advances in machine learning, which we recast as a quality-adjusted drop in the price of prediction. How will this sharp drop in price impact society? Policy will...

Thanks to big data, artificial intelligence (AI) has spurred exciting innovations. In the meantime, AI and big data are reshaping the risk in consumer privacy and data security. In this essay, I first define the nature of the problem and then present a few facts about the ongoing risk. The bulk...