CCS '94 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Computer and communications security
Individual Marketing with Imperfect Targetability
Marketing Science
Consumer Addressability and Customized Pricing
Marketing Science
Privacy, economics, and price discrimination on the Internet
ICEC '03 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Electronic commerce
Competitive One-to-One Promotions
Management Science
Conditioning Prices on Purchase History
Marketing Science
Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets
SP '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Identity Management, Privacy, and Price Discrimination
IEEE Security and Privacy
Overcoming Online Information Privacy Concerns: An Information-Processing Theory Approach
Journal of Management Information Systems
Privacy Regulation and Online Advertising
Management Science
An economic analysis of user-privacy options in ad-supported services
WINE'12 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
ACM SIGecom Exchanges
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When a firm can recognize its previous customers, it may use information about their past purchases to price discriminate. We study a model with a monopolist and a continuum of heterogeneous consumers, where consumers have the ability to maintain their anonymity and avoid being identified as past customers, possibly at a cost. When consumers can freely maintain their anonymity, they all individually choose to do so, which results in the highest profit for the monopolist. Increasing the cost of anonymity can benefit consumers but only up to a point, after which the effect is reversed. We show that if the monopolist or an independent third party controls the cost of anonymity, it often works to the detriment of consumers.