We study markets for sensitive personal information. An agent wants to communicate with another party but any revealed information can be intercepted and sold to a third party whose reaction harms the agent. The market for information induces an adverse sorting effect, allocating the information...

Google's new “Interest Based Advertising” (IBA) program represents the company's first foray into what is generally called “Online Behavioral Advertising”: In order to deliver more relevant advertising, Google will begin tailoring ads delivered through AdSense on the Google Content...

Online privacy, child safety, free speech and anonymity are on a collision course. The 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) already mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, but many advocate expanding online privacy protections for both adolescents and...

A monopolist can use a 'tracking' technology that allows it to identify a consumer's willingness to pay with some probability. Consumers can counteract tracking by acquiring a 'hiding' technology. We show in this note that consumers are collectively better off when this hiding technology is not...

I examine how firms strategically bundle news reports to offset the negative effects of a privacy breach disclosure. Using a complete dataset of privacy breaches from 2005 to 2014, I find that firms experience a small and significant 0.27% decrease in their stock price on average following the...

I examine how firms strategically bundle news reports to offset the negative effects of a privacy breach disclosure. Using a complete dataset of privacy breaches from 2005 to 2014, I find that firms experience a small and significant 0.27% decrease in their stock price on average following the...

Cybersecurity breaches pose a substantial privacy concern in the digital era. We investigate how customers respond to privacy leakage in multiple unexpected data breaches. Difference-in-differences estimates show that digital payments declined by 4.6% ~ 7.5% relative to cash payments immediately...

There are increasingly many digital alternatives to physical cash as basic means of payment, many of these offered by non-financial private sector actors. While such a trend towards a cashless society brings the convenience of digital payments to users and can encourage innovation in financial...