Strategic responses to personalized pricing and demand for privacy: An experiment

By Inácio Bó, Li Chen and Rustamdjan Hakimov
Published in Games and Economic Behavior

Abstract:

We consider situations in which consumers are aware that a statistical model determines the price of a product based on their observed behavior. Using a novel experiment varying the context similarity between participant data and a product, we find that participants manipulate their responses to a survey regarding personal characteristics, and manipulation is more successful when the contexts are similar. Moreover, participants demand less privacy, and make less optimal privacy choices when the contexts are less similar. Our findings highlight the importance of data privacy policies in the age of big data, in which behavior in apparently unrelated contexts might affect prices.