When a firm can recognize its previous customers, it may use information about their past purchases in order to price discriminate. We study a model with a monopolist and a continuum of heterogeneous consumers, where consumers have the ability to maintain their anonymity and avoid being...

Motivated by the unprecedented availability of consumer information on the Internet, we characterize the winners and losers from potential privacy regulation in the context of four commonly-used oligopoly models: a linear city model, a circular city model, a vertical differentiation model, and a...

Personal privacy is studied in the context of a competitive product (or labor) market. In the first stage of the game, firms that sell homogeneous goods or services (e.g., insurance, credit, or rental housing) post prices they promise to charge approved applicants. In the second stage, each...

When a firm can recognize its previous customers, it may use information about their past purchases to price discriminate. We study a model with a monopolist and a continuum of heterogeneous consumers, where consumers have the ability to maintain their anonymity and avoid being identified as...

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...

This article summarizes and draws connections among diverse streams of theoretical and empirical research on the economics of privacy. We focus on the economic value and consequences of protecting and disclosing personal information, and on consumers' understanding and decisions regarding the...