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1. Price Discrimination in the Information Age: Prices, Poaching, and Privacy with Personalized Targeted Discounts

   https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdac073  

   Baik, Simon Anderson; Larson, Nathan (October 2022, The Review of Economic Studies)

   Abstract We study list price competition when firms can individually target consumer discounts (at a cost) afterwards, and we address recent privacy regulation (like the GDPR) allowing consumers to choose whether to opt-in to targeting. Targeted consumers receive poaching and retention discount offers. Equilibrium discount offers are in mixed strategies, but only two firms vie for each contested consumer and final profits on them are Bertrand-like. When targeting is unrestricted, firm list pricing resembles monopoly. For plausible demand conditions and if targeting costs are not too low, firms and consumers are worse off with unrestricted targeting than banning it. However, targeting induces higher (lower) list prices if demand is convex (concave), and either side of the market can benefit if list prices shift enough in its favour. Given the choice, consumers opt in only when expected discounts exceed privacy costs. Under empirically plausible conditions, opt-in choice makes all consumers better off. 

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2. Consumption of trematode parasite infectious stages: from conceptual synthesis to future research agenda

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022149X23000111  

   Koprivnikar, J.; Thieltges, D.W.; Johnson, P.T.J. (January 2023, Journal of Helminthology)

   Abstract Given their sheer cumulative biomass and ubiquitous presence, parasites are increasingly recognized as essential components of most food webs. Beyond their influence as consumers of host tissue, many parasites also have free-living infectious stages that may be ingested by non-host organisms, with implications for energy and nutrient transfer, as well as for pathogen transmission and infectious disease dynamics. This has been particularly well-documented for the cercaria free-living stage of digenean trematode parasites within the Phylum Platyhelminthes. Here, we aim to synthesize the current state of knowledge regarding cercariae consumption by examining: (a) approaches for studying cercariae consumption; (b) the range of consumers and trematode prey documented thus far; (c) factors influencing the likelihood of cercariae consumption; (d) consequences of cercariae consumption for individual predators (e.g. their viability as a food source); and (e) implications of cercariae consumption for entire communities and ecosystems (e.g. transmission, nutrient cycling and influences on other prey). We detected 121 unique consumer-by-cercaria combinations that spanned 60 species of consumer and 35 trematode species. Meaningful reductions in transmission were seen for 31 of 36 combinations that considered this; however, separate studies with the same cercaria and consumer sometimes showed different results. Along with addressing knowledge gaps and suggesting future research directions, we highlight how the conceptual and empirical approaches discussed here for consumption of cercariae are relevant for the infectious stages of other parasites and pathogens, illustrating the use of cercariae as a model system to help advance our knowledge regarding the general importance of parasite consumption. 

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3. Valuation and Collaboration among Craft Brewers: Early Insights from an Analysis of Consumer Ratings

   McInerney, Paul-Brian (July 2018, International Sociological Association Annual Meeting)

   null (Ed.)

   In pursuing the problem of (e)valuation in sociology, this paper is concerned with the collaborative dynamics that create value. Based on a unique dataset of 225 collaborations among craft brewers, we analyze which combinations of organizations increase consumer ratings of the beers produced. Craft brewing provides a fascinating laboratory for the study of how consumers rate the products of collaborative formations. Collaborations between craft brewers result in one-off products, beers that exist for a limited period of time, rarely to be produced again. Such collaborations occur frequently and exist over the course of several weeks or months, until the product is brewed, packaged, and distributed. At that point, collaborators return to their daily brewing operations. With the help of several research assistants, we created a dataset of craft brewer all collaborations in which at least one brewer was located in Illinois. The data are compiled from websites on which consumers rate beers: RateBeer and Untappd. Initial analyses shows that brewers that follow certain strategies are likely to collaborate with others pursuing certain strategies. For example, we find that brewers that engage in serial hook-ups are likely to do so with brewers that are outside of their core networks while monogamists are likely to seek out those who engage in serial hook-ups. These strategies have consequences for the valuation of their efforts. The products of craft brewers who collaborate with those outside of their core networks consistently receive higher consumer ratings than other forms of collaboration. We suspect that certain collaborative arrangements facilitate authenticity or novelty in the marketplace, which consumers reward with higher ratings. We plan to test hypotheses related to whether authenticity or novelty are driving changes in consumer valuations of products. 

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4. Reconciling the Paradoxical Findings of Choice Overload Through an Analytical Lens

   https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2021/16954  

   Zhang, Nan; Xu, Heng (December 2021, MIS Quarterly)

   Too much of a good thing can be harmful. Choice overload, a compelling paradox in consumer psychology, exemplifies this notion with the idea that offering more product options could impede rather than improve consumer satisfaction, even when consumers are free to ignore any available option. After attracting intense interest in the past decades from multiple disciplines, research on choice overload has produced voluminous yet paradoxical findings that are widely perceived as inconsistent even at the meta-analytic level. This paper launches an interdisciplinary inquiry to resolve the inconsistencies on both the conceptual and empirical fronts. Specifically, we identified a surprising butrobust pattern among the existing empirical evidence for the choiceoverload effect and demonstrated through mathematical analysis and extensive simulation studies that the pattern would only likely emerge from one specific type of latent mechanism underlying the moderated choiceoverload effect. The paper discusses the research and practical implications of our findings—namely, the broad promise of analytical meta-analysis (an emerging area for the use of data analytics) and machine learning to address the widely recognized inconsistencies in social and behavioral sciences, and the unique and salient role of the information systems community in developing this new era of meta-analysis. 

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5. PIVA: Privacy-Preserving Identity Verification Methods for Accountless Users via Private List Intersection and Variants

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70896-1_18  

   Hwang, Seoyeon; Jarecki, Stanislaw; Karl, Zane; van_Kempen, Elina; Tsudik, Gene (September 2024, Springer Nature Switzerland)

   Garcia-Alfaro, J; Kozik, R; Choraś, M; Katsikas, S (Ed.)

   Several prominent privacy regulation (e.g., CCPA and GDPR) require service providers to let consumers request access to, correct, or delete, their personal data. Compliance necessitates verification of consumer identity. This is not a problem for consumers who already have an account with a service provider since they can authenticate themselves via a successful account log-in. However, there are no such methods for accountless consumers, even though service providers routinely collect data about casual consumers, i.e., those without accounts. Currently, in order to access their collected data, accountless consumers are asked to provide Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to service providers, which is privacy-invasive. To address this problem, we propose PIVA: Privacy-Preserving Identity Verification for Accountless Users, a technique based on Private List Intersection (PLI) and its variants. First, we introduce PLI, a close relative of private set intersection (PSI), a well-known cryptographic primitive that allows two or more mutually suspicious parties to compute the intersection of their private input sets. PLI takes advantage of the (ordered and fixed) list structure of each party’s private set. As a result, PLI is more efficient than PSI. We also explore PLI variants: PLI-cardinality (PLI-CA), threshold-PLI (t-PLI), and threshold-PLI-cardinality (t-PLI-CA), all of which yield less information than PLI. These variants are progressively better suited for addressing the accountless consumer authentication problem. We prototype and compare its performance against techniques based on regular PSI and garbled circuits (GCs). Results show that proposed PLI and PLI-CA constructions are more efficient than GC-based techniques, in terms of both computation and communication overheads. While GC-based t-PLI and t-PLI-CA execute faster, proposed constructs greatly outperform the former in terms of bandwidth, e.g., our t-PLI protocol consumes less bandwidth. We also show that proposed protocols can be made secure against malicious adversaries, with only moderate increases in overhead. These variants outperform their GC-based counterparts by at least one order of magnitude. 

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