Consumer Privacy and Targeted Pricing with Stochastic Valuations

The general data protection regulation (GDPR) represents a dramatic shift in global privacy regulation. We focus on GDPR’s enhanced consumer consent requirements that aim to provide transparent and active elicitation of data allowances. We evaluate the effect of enhanced consent on consumer opt-in behavior and on firm behavior and outcomes after consent is solicited. Utilizing an experiment at a large telecommunications provider with operations in Europe, we find that opt-in for different data types and uses increased once GDPR-compliant consent was elicited. However, consumers did not uniformly increase data allowances and continued to generally restrict permissions for more sensitive or tangential uses of their personal information. We also find that sales, the efficacy of marketing communications, and contractual lock-in increased after consumers provided new data allowances. Additional analysis suggests that these gains to the firm emerged because new data allowances enabled them to increase their use of targeted marketing for households that were amenable to these marketing efforts. These results have significant implications for firms and policymakers and suggest that enhanced consent provided via GDPR may be effective for increasing consumer privacy protection while also allowing firms reliant on consumers’ personal information to improve outcomes. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.

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Rising tides? Data capture, platform accumulation, and new monopolies in the digital music economy

New Media & Society ◽

10.1177/1461444818800998 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 21 (3) ◽

pp. 543-561 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Leslie M Meier ◽

Vincent R Manzerolle

Keyword(s):

Critical Analysis ◽

Capital Accumulation ◽

Attention Capture ◽

Data Capture ◽

Newspaper Coverage ◽

Business Strategies ◽

Digital Music ◽

Consumer Privacy ◽

User Data ◽

Jay Z

This article examines the roles of platform-based distribution and user data in the digital music economy. Drawing on trade press, newspaper coverage, and a consumer privacy complaint, we offer a critical analysis of tech-music partnerships forged between Samsung and Jay-Z (2013), Apple iTunes Store and U2 (2014), Tidal and Kanye West (2016), and Apple Music and Drake (2017). In these cases, information technology (IT) companies supported album releases, and music was used to generate user data and attention: logics of data and attention capture were interwoven. The IT and music industries have adapted their business strategies to what we conceptualize as platform-based capital accumulation or ‘platform accumulation’, and models centred on controlling access and extracting rent have enabled the emergence of new monopolies and IT gatekeepers.

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