This chapter first describes the standard economic analysis of privacy, data protection and surveillance, looking at the costs and benefits to different parties and the incentives each therefore has, as well as the aggregate social welfare impacts of their decisions. It then considers the market...

This chapter reviews economic analyses of privacy. We begin by scrutinizing the "free market" critique of privacy regulation. Welfare may be non-monotone in the quantity of information, hence there may be excessive incentive to collect information. This result applies to both non-productive and...

We provide a revealed preference analysis of the transferable utility hypothesis, which is widely used in economic models. First, we establish revealed preference conditions that must be satisfied for observed group behavior to be consistent with Pareto efficiency under transferable utility....

This paper proposes an auxiliary particle filter algorithm for inference in regime switching stochastic volatility models in which the regime state is governed by a first-order Markov chain. We proposes an ongoing updated Dirichlet distribution to estimate the transition probabilities of the...

Standard essential patents have emerged as a major focus in both the public policy and academic arenas. The primary concern is that once a patented technology has been incorporated into a standard, the standard can effectively insulate it from competition from substitute technologies. To guard...

This paper provides expressions for solutions of a one-dimensional global optimization problem using an adjoint variable which represents the available one-sided improvements up to the interval “horizon.” Interpreting the problem in terms of optimal stopping or optimal starting, the solution...

This paper examines the impact of currency numerosity on consumer perceptions of the value of transactions. It extends current theorizing on money illusion in several important ways. We propose a conceptualization that not only considers the nominal prices faced by consumers but, in line with...

We present necessary and sufficient revealed preference conditions to verify whether a finite data set on nonlinear budget sets is consistent with the maximization of a quasi–concave utility function. Our results can be used to test for convexity of the underlying preference relation. We also...

When faced with making economic trade-offs between lower upfront purchase costs and lower operating costs, many consumers experience “capital bias”, a phenomenon that is tantamount to discounting future costs excessively. Consumers may therefore end up with investments that are sub-optimal...