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...

Digitization makes it easier for firms to build their innovation and marketing efforts around consumers' personal data. In this research, we employ a privacy perspective based on contextual integrity to examine how such practices can trigger privacy concerns. We propose that small...

'Notice and Choice' has been a mainstay of policies designed to safeguard consumer privacy. This paper investigates distortions in consumer behavior when faced with notice and choice which may limit the ability of consumers to safeguard their privacy using field experiment data from the MIT...

This paper investigates whether larger quantities of historical data affect a firm's ability to maintain market share in Internet search. We study whether the length of time that search engines retained their server logs affected the apparent accuracy of subsequent searches. Our analysis...

This paper explores how digitization and the associated use of customer data have affected the evolution of consumer privacy concerns. We measure privacy concerns by reluctance to disclose income in an online marketing research survey. Using over three million responses over eight years, our...

Advertisers use online customer data to target their marketing appeals. This has heightened consumers' privacy concerns, leading governments to pass laws designed to protect consumer privacy by restricting the use of data and by restricting online tracking techniques used by websites. We use the...

This paper explores how state genetic privacy laws affect the diffusion of personalized medicine, using data on genetic testing for cancer risks. State genetic privacy regimes employ and combine up to three alternative approaches to protecting patient privacy: Rules requiring that an individual...

This paper quantifies the effect of state privacy regulation on the diffusion of Electronic Medical Records (EMR). EMR allow medical providers to store and exchange patient information using computers rather than paper records. Hospitals may be more likely to adopt EMR if they can reassure...

This chapter summarizes the fundamental questions underlying the economics of privacy. It highlights the tension between the multifaceted concept of privacy as commonly used in policy debates and its conceptualization as part of a utility function. The chapter then sets out new challenges for...

The COVID-19 pandemic has gravely disrupted the world's economy and killed millions of people. A safe and effective vaccine was developed remarkably swiftly, but as of yet uptake of the vaccine has been slow. This paper explores one potential explanation of delayed adoption of the vaccine, which...