Data, Competition, and Consumer Privacy in Digital Markets

In digital markets personal information is pervasively collected by firms. In the first chapter I study data ownership and product customization when there is exclusive access to non rival but excludable data about consumer preferences. I show that an incumbent firm does not have an incentive to sell an exclusively held dataset with a rival firm, but instead it has an incentive to trade a customizing technology with the other firm. In the second chapter I investigate the effects of consumer information on the intensity of competition. In a two dimensional model of product differentiation, firms use information on preferences to practice price discrimination. I contrast a full privacy and a no privacy benchmark with a regime in which firms are able to target consumers only partially. When data is partially informative, firms are always better-off with price discrimination and an exclusive access to user data is not necessarily a competition policy concern. From a consumer protection perspective, the policy recommendation is that the regulator should promote either no privacy or full privacy. In the third chapter I introduce a data broker that observes either only one or both dimensions of consumer information and sells this data to competing firms for price discrimination purposes. When the seller exogenously holds a partially informative dataset, an exclusive allocation arises. Instead, when the dataset held is fully informative, the data broker trades information non exclusively but each competitor acquires consumer data on a different dimension. When data collection is made endogenous, non exclusivity is robust if collection costs are not too high. The competition policy suggestion is that exclusivity should not be banned per se, but it is data differentiation in equilibrium that rises market power in competitive markets. Upstream competition is sufficient to ensure that both firms get access to consumer information.

Consumer behaviour: conceptualisation, scale development and validation of agro-food chain fairness

Although there is broad agreement on the need to transition to a fairer agro-food system, consumer potential in shaping a fair food system has often been overlooked. There is no unique definition of the concept of fairness from the consumer’s perspective. In addition, there are no scales in the academic literature that address fairness in its broad sense, as the existing scales focus on specific and limited aspects that provide a partial picture of the concept. Lack of a true and trustworthy measurement of the notion has been a significant barrier to the knowledge of fairness in agro-food systems from the individual-differences perspective. The individual-differences perspective helps explain why some individuals are more likely than others to put emphasis on the extent to which agro-food chains are fair. Individual consumer perception of an ethical problem is followed by the perception of various alternatives that might lead to a solution. Therefore, the current research intends to make two significant contributions by resolving these constraints. First, advance the literature by providing a new viewpoint to understand fairness in the agro-food chain. Indeed, the research provides a comprehensive conceptualisation of fairness that embraces different aspects of fairness and describes the concept in all its facets and nuances. Second, the research provides a valid, reliable, and invariant measurement of the individual disposition toward fairness in agro-food chains by rooting the items in the theoretical underpinnings of the fairness literature. Overall, this research provides a comprehensive suite of approaches and tools to enhance the resilience, integrity and sustainability of agro-food chains.