Do Consumers Benefit from Selling their Data? The Economic Effects of Personal Data Brokers in Digital Markets

78 Pages Posted: 16 Mar 2018 Last revised: 9 Mar 2022

See all articles by Bastian Haberer

Bastian Haberer

University of Passau

Jan Kraemer

University of Passau; Center on Regulation in Europe (CERRE)

Daniel Schnurr

University of Regensburg

Date Written: March 9, 2022

Abstract

Personal data brokers (PDBs) offer consumers financial rewards for their personal data that they have created at online content and service providers (CSPs) as a by-product of their usage. Policy makers view PDBs as a promising building block for empowering users in the digital economy and have facilitated their emergence by new privacy rights that allow consumers to access and port their data. We develop a game-theoretic model to investigate how PDBs affect market outcomes in digital markets and under which conditions users will indeed benefit from them. Across several model variants, we find that in markets with a PDB two main equilibrium outcomes exist. First, a minimum income equilibrium can arise, where the PDB only pays a minimal reward, and the CSP strategically lowers its service quality, leaving consumers worse off than without a PDB. Second, a positive income equilibrium can arise, where the PDB pays significant rewards to consumers, and the CSP’s quality may be higher or lower depending on the PDB's efficiency in generating data revenues. Whether consumers are better off in this equilibrium depends on the relative strengths of three effects that we characterize formally and denote as competition effect, displacement effect, and appropriation effect. In particular, we show that for consumers to benefit from a PDB it is a necessary condition that the PDB increases aggregate industry revenues from data; but in this case, the CSP will also demand a higher (non-zero) price from consumers for using its service. Thus, our results bear important managerial and policy implications for data-driven business models and the regulation of data access and data portability.

Keywords: data brokers, personal information management systems, data portability, quality of online services, information intermediaries, data-driven business models, data economy, digital policy

Suggested Citation

Haberer, Bastian and Kraemer, Jan and Schnurr, Daniel, Do Consumers Benefit from Selling their Data? The Economic Effects of Personal Data Brokers in Digital Markets (March 9, 2022). TPRC 46: The 46th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy 2018, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3141946 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3141946

Bastian Haberer (Contact Author)

University of Passau ( email )

Dr.-Hans-Kapfinger-Str. 12
Passau, 94032
Germany

Jan Kraemer

University of Passau ( email )

Chair of Internet and Telecommunications Business
Dr.-Hans-Kapfinger-Str. 12
Passau, D-94036
Germany
+498515092580 (Phone)
+498525092582 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.kraemer.biz

Center on Regulation in Europe (CERRE) ( email )

Rue de l'Industrie 42
Brussels, 1040
Belgium

Daniel Schnurr

University of Regensburg

Bajuwarenstrasse 4
Regensburg, 93040
Germany

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