Marc Bourreau, Jean-Marc Zogheib
- Abstract
- Two firms compete in prices and information disclosure levels. Firms derive revenues from two possible channels, i.e., by selling their service to consumers and by exploiting user data, sold to a monopoly data broker. A consumer signing up to one firm's service decides on the amount of personal information to provide. In a single-homing framework, firms engage in either a strict privacy regime with no information disclosure and high prices or a flexible privacy regime with positive disclosure levels and low prices, depending on consumer valuations. With the possibility of multi-homing, firms face issues in the monetization of multi-homing user data, which affects privacy regimes. On top of consumer valuations, the incentives to multi-home and product differentiation also impact firms' strategies. Firms may even end up engaging in a zero-privacy regime with maximal disclosure levels if monetization issues on multi-homing user data are not too significant.
- Mot(s) clé(s)
- competition, online privacy, information disclosure, multi-homing.
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