The success of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as an online research platform has come at a price: MTurk has suffered from slowing rates of population replenishment, and growing participant ...non-naivety. Recently, a number of alternative platforms have emerged, offering capabilities similar to MTurk but providing access to new and more naïve populations. After surveying several options, we empirically examined two such platforms, CrowdFlower (CF) and Prolific Academic (ProA). In two studies, we found that participants on both platforms were more naïve and less dishonest compared to MTurk participants. Across the three platforms, CF provided the best response rate, but CF participants failed more attention-check questions and did not reproduce known effects replicated on ProA and MTurk. Moreover, ProA participants produced data quality that was higher than CF's and comparable to MTurk's. ProA and CF participants were also much more diverse than participants from MTurk.
The Economics of Privacy Acquisti, Alessandro; Taylor, Curtis; Wagman, Liad
Journal of economic literature,
06/2016, Volume:
54, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article summarizes and draws connections among diverse streams of theoretical and empirical research on the economics of privacy. We focus on the economic value and consequences of protecting ...and disclosing personal information, and on consumers' understanding and decisions regarding the trade-offs associated with the pnvacy and the sharing of personal data. We highlight how the economic analysis of pnvacy evolved over time, as advancements in information technology raised increasingly nuanced and complex issues. We find and highlight three themes that connect diverse insights from the literature. First, characterizing a single unifying economic theory of privacy is hard, because pnvacy issues of economic relevance arise in widely diverse contexts. Second, there are theoretical and empirical situations where the protection of privacy can both enhance and detract from individual and societal welfare. Third, in digital economies, consumers' ability to make informed decisions about their privacy is severely hindered because consumers are often in a position of imperfect or asymmetric information regarding when their data is collected, for what purposes, and with what consequences. We conclude the article by highlighting some of the ongoing issues in the pnvacy debate of interest to economists.
Privacy and human behavior in the age of information Acquisti, Alessandro; Brandimarte, Laura; Loewenstein, George
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
01/2015, Volume:
347, Issue:
6221
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This Review summarizes and draws connections between diverse streams of empirical research on privacy behavior. We use three themes to connect insights from social and behavioral sciences: people's ...uncertainty about the consequences of privacy-related behaviors and their own preferences over those consequences; the context-dependence of people's concern, or lack thereof, about privacy; and the degree to which privacy concerns are malleable—manipulable by commercial and governmental interests. Organizing our discussion by these themes, we offer observations concerning the role of public policy in the protection of privacy in the information age.
Data quality is one of the major concerns of using crowdsourcing websites such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to recruit participants for online behavioral studies. We compared two methods for ...ensuring data quality on MTurk: attention check questions (ACQs) and restricting participation to MTurk workers with high reputation (above 95% approval ratings). In Experiment
1
, we found that high-reputation workers rarely failed ACQs and provided higher-quality data than did low-reputation workers; ACQs improved data quality only for low-reputation workers, and only in some cases. Experiment
2
corroborated these findings and also showed that more productive high-reputation workers produce the highest-quality data. We concluded that sampling high-reputation workers can ensure high-quality data without having to resort to using ACQs, which may lead to selection bias if participants who fail ACQs are excluded post-hoc.
Information about an individual's place and date of birth can be exploited to predict his or her Social Security number (SSN). Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation ...between individuals' SSNs and their birth data and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs. The inferences are made possible by the public availability of the Social Security Administration's Death Master File and the widespread accessibility of personal information from multiple sources, such as data brokers or profiles on social networking sites. Our results highlight the unexpected privacy consequences of the complex interactions among multiple data sources in modern information economies and quantify privacy risks associated with information revelation in public forums.
In the United States, identity theft resulted in corporate and consumer losses of $56 billion dollars in 2005, with up to 35 percent of known identity thefts caused by corporate data breaches. Many ...states have responded by adopting data breach disclosure laws that require firms to notify consumers if their personal information has been lost or stolen. Although the laws are expected to reduce identity theft, their effect has yet to be empirically measured. We use panel data from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to estimate the impact of data breach disclosure laws on identity theft from 2002 to 2009. We find that adoption of data breach disclosure laws reduce identity theft caused by data breaches, on average, by 6.1 percent.
Conditioning Prices on Purchase History Acquisti, Alessandro; Varian, Hal R
Marketing science (Providence, R.I.),
07/2005, Volume:
24, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The rapid advance in information technology now makes it feasible for sellers to condition their price offers on consumers prior purchase behavior. In this paper we examine when it is profitable to ...engage in this form of price discrimination when consumers can adopt strategies to protect their privacy.
Our baseline model involves rational consumers with constant valuations for the goods being sold and a monopoly merchant who can commit to a pricing policy. Applying results from the prior literature, we show that although it is feasible to price so as to distinguish high-value and low-value consumers, the merchant will never find it optimal to do so.
We then consider various generalizations of this model, such as allowing the seller to offer enhanced services to previous customers, making the merchant unable to commit to a pricing policy, and allowing competition in the marketplace. In these cases we show that sellers will, in general, find it profitable to condition prices on purchase history.
In this Essay, we examine some of the factors that make developing a "science of security" a significant research and policy challenge. We focus on how the empirical hurdles of missing data, ...inaccurate data, and invalid inferences can significantly impact—and sometimes impair—the security decisionmaking processes of individuals, firms, and policymakers. We offer practical examples of the sensitivity of policy modeling to those hurdles and highlight the relevance of these examples in the context of national security.
We review different streams of social science literature on privacy with the goal of understanding consumer privacy decision making and deriving implications for policy. We focus on psychological and ...economic factors influencing both consumers' desire and consumers' ability to protect their privacy, either through individual action or through the implementation of regulations applying to firms. Contrary to depictions of online sharing behaviors as careless, we show how consumers fundamentally care about online privacy, and present evidence of numerous actions they take to protect it. However, we also document how prohibitively difficult it is to attain desired, or even desirable, levels of privacy through individual action alone. The remaining instrument for privacy protection is policy intervention. However, again for both psychological and economic reasons, the collective impetus for adequate intervention is often countervailed by powerful interests that oppose it.
This article is part of a Research Dialogue:
Krishna (2020): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1186
Oyserman & Schwarz (2020): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1189
Mulligan et al. (2020): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1190
Jagadish (2020): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1188
Acquisti et al. (2020): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1187
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