Selling Cookies

Bergemann, Dirk; Bonatti, Alessandro

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2493124

Cited by 50 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…By disclosing information about consumers, the platform ensures that consumers will see the most relevant advertisements, whereas when no information is disclosed under a complete privacy regime, ads are displayed randomly. They find that targeted advertising can lead to higher prices and, in line with Levin and Milgrom (2010) and Bergemann and Bonatti (2015), that improving match quality by disclosing consumer information to firms might be too costly to an intermediary because of the informational rent that is passed on to firms. Given a relationship between the match quality of advertising and consumer demand, it is then possible to specify conditions under which some privacy or some limits to disclosure are optimal for an intermediary (see, also, Cowan 2007).…”

Section: Data Intermediariesmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Doing so, the intermediary manipulates the elasticity of the demands faced by its affiliated firms. Bergemann and Bonatti (2015) study the acquisition of user-pertinent information by an advertising platform and its subsequent sale to advertisers. In their model, a data provider sets the price of an information record (e.g., a cookie).…”

Section: Data Intermediariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Economics of Privacy

Acquisti

Taylor²,

Wagman³

2016

Journal of Economic Literature

894

406

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Section: Data Intermediariesmentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Data Intermediariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Economics of Privacy

Acquisti

Taylor²,

Wagman³

2016

Journal of Economic Literature

894

406

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Because match values with a given seller v (· , j) are identically distributed, we can reformulate the seller's problem as choosing a threshold v to maximize profits given 16 In the working paper Bergemann and Bonatti (2013), we show that the conditions of Proposition 5 also determine the effect of the cost c on the advertisers' marginal willingness to pay for any targeted set A . The comparative statics of the monopoly price require further assumptions on the distribution of values.…”

mentioning

confidence: 94%

“…We maintain this restriction in Proposition 11, whose proof is in the working paper, Bergemann and Bonatti (2013).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Selling Cookies

Bergemann

Bonatti

2015

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

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T he use of individual-level information is rapidly increasing in many economic and political environments, ranging from advertising (various forms of targeting) to electoral campaigns (identifying voters who are likely to switch or to turn out). In all these environments, the socially efficient match between individual and "treatment" may require the collection, analysis, and diffusion of highly personalized data. A large number of important policy and regulatory questions are beginning to emerge around the use of personal information. To properly frame these questions, we must understand how markets for personalized information impact the creation of surplus, which is the main objective of this paper.Much of the relevant data is collected and distributed by data brokers and data intermediaries ranging from established companies such as Acxiom and Bloomberg, to more recently established companies such as Bluekai and eXelate. Perhaps the most prevalent technology to enable the collection and resale of individual-level information is based on cookies and related means of recording browsing data. Cookies are small files placed by a website in a user's web browser that record information about the user's visit. Data providers use several partner websites to place cookies on user's computers and collect information. In particular, the first time any user visits a partner site (e.g., a travel site), a cookie is sent to her browser, recording

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“…In contrast to this line of work, our model admits monetary transfers and rules out any direct effect of the buyer's ex post action on the seller's utility. Our previous work (Bergemann and Bonatti 2015) considered the information-acquisition policy of a data buyer who then decided on the placement of display advertising. This earlier model was simpler in many respects.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Design and Price of Information

Bergemann

Bonatti²,

Smolin

2018

American Economic Review

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141

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The mechanisms by which information is traded can shape the creation and the distribution of surplus in many important markets. Information about individual borrowers guides banks' lending decisions, information about consumers' characteristics facilitates targeted online advertising, and information about a patient's genome enhances health care delivery. In all these settings, information buyers (i.e., lenders, advertisers, and health care providers) have private knowledge relevant to their decision problem at the time of contracting (e.g., independent knowledge of a borrower, prior interactions with specific consumers, access to a patient's family history). Thus, potential data buyers seek to acquire supplemental information to improve the quality of their decision making.In this paper, we develop a framework to analyze the sale of supplemental information. We consider a data buyer who faces a decision problem under uncertainty. A monopolist data seller owns a database containing information about a "state" variable that is relevant to the buyer's decision. Initially, the data buyer has only partial information about the state. This information is private to the data buyer

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Selling Cookies

Cited by 50 publications

References 27 publications

The Economics of Privacy

The Economics of Privacy

Selling Cookies

The Design and Price of Information

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