大数据、个人信息保护和价格歧视——基于垂直差异化双寡头模型的分析

Big Data,Personal Information Protection and Price Discrimination:Based on a Vertically Differentiated Duopoly Model

本文从价格歧视角度出发,讨论大数据时代非敏感个人信息保护的利与弊。传统文献认为,在垄断市场结构下,无个人信息保护会使厂商利用大数据对消费者进行一级价格歧视,从而最小化消费者剩余。本文则证明,一旦引入竞争,消费者总剩余和社会总福利在无个人信息保护和完全一级价格歧视时达到最大,而禁止价格歧视则带来产品的无效分配。此外,不同类型的消费者和厂商对个人信息保护政策的偏好不同。据此,本文认为引入竞争是解决企业利用大数据压榨消费者的有效途径,且消费者的非敏感个人信息应在竞争厂商间公平共享,从而为政策制定者在制定个人信息保护政策时根据行业特点协调各方利益提供了一定的理论依据。

With the development of information technology,data has become an important core element in digital economy.It is integrated into the process of economic value creation,and continues to reconstruct social politics,economy,and other aspects of the existing forms of life.Meanwhile,the issues of personal information collection and utilization have been brought into the spotlight.China has obtained a wide range of social consensus on the government-level data sharing and personal information protection,but the market-level personal information protection is still on the way.To solve the aforementioned problems,this paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of personal information protection in the era of big data from the perspective of price discrimination.Based on a vertical differentiated duopoly model,it studies the effects of different levels of personal information protection policies on the equilibrium pricing and social welfare of all players.According to different degrees of personal information protection in real life,this paper also considers three types of personal information protection policies,namely no personal information protection,voluntary personal information protection policy and mandatory personal information protection policy.In the model constructed in this paper,the government is able to set the personal information protection policy in the first stage of the game.If voluntary personal information protection policy is implemented,consumers can choose whether to disclose information to firms.After two firms set their prices based on consumers’information,consumers finally make their purchase decisions.The pricing strategies of producers under the three kinds of personal information protection policies are solved in turn,and the consumer purchase behavior is described.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)Without personal information protection,the total surplus of consumers and the total welfare of society are the largest.(2)Consumers with high willingness to pay are more likely to benefit from personal information protection policies.(3)No private information protection vitiates producers’surplus most,and different manufacturers have different preferences for personal information protection policies.(4)Personal information protection policies will lead to inefficient allocation of products.The analysis of this paper has some policy implications on how to protect consumers’personal information.First,in the era of big data,consumers can be protected by introducing and maintaining competition among manufacturers in the market,rather than by over-protecting their personal information.Second,personal information protection policies have heterogeneous impacts on different types of consumers.In other words,policy makers should discriminately protect consumers who are"fooled by acquired big data"and charged with high prices.At the same time,they should also be aware of some consumers who benefit from manufacturers’discriminatory pricing.Third,businesses and consumers will prefer different personal information protection policies.This will inspire policy makers to clarify the protection objectives and consider the interests of all parties when formulating personal information protection policies.The important theoretical innovation of this paper is to provide a concise but insightful framework,find some reasonable results which are new to the existing literature,and supplement the relevant literature in the fields of data protection and price discrimination.The model setting in this paper reflects the influence of market competition structure on the pricing strategy of manufacturers using personal information of consumers.The conclusion also reasonably reflects the residual extraction effect and the competition effect of manufacturers on consumers in competition.In addition,this paper assumes that there is no cost for consumers to hide information based on the practice of Conitzer et al.(2012).This assumption simplifies the information structure of manufacturers to a certain extent.The follow-up research can be extended to multi-manufacturer and continuous quality level,and also to consumers who need to pay the cost to protect their personal information.Moreover,one can also increase the process of manufacturers’access to information at cost in the game.