What Should a Firm Know? Protecting Consumers? Privacy Rents

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bird, Daniel; Neeman, Zvika
• 署名单位: Tel Aviv University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MICROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7669
• DOI: 10.1257/mic.20200215
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 257-295
• 关键词: information; persuasion; COMPETITION; ECONOMICS

摘要

A monopolistic firm observes a signal about the state of the world and then makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to an uninformed consumer who has recourse to some outside option. We provide a geometric characterization of the firm's information structure that maximizes the consumer's surplus: the optimal regime partitions the space of payoff states into polyhedral cones with disjoint interiors. We inter-pret our results in terms of the maximization of the consumer's pri-vacy rent. We illustrate and motivate our approach through the example of the regulation of the privacy of medical information in monopolistic health insurance markets. (JEL D21, D42, D83, G22, I13)