Abstract
With the wide use of information technologies including Big Data and AI, consumers’ personal actions (their search history, transaction records, click-through behaviors, etc.) can be tracked, recorded and analysed by the platform firm (e.g., Google) to provide personalized services. In this thesis, we study how the introduction of new technologies influences the joint effect of online platforms and consumers’ data provision on both firms’ and consumers’ welfares.Essay 1: Who Should Own the Data? --- The Impact of Data Ownership Shift from the Service Provider to Consumers
Under the current regime, consumers usually hand over their personal data for free in exchange for high-quality services. As it becomes more and more commonly accepted that “data is property”, should consumers be entitled to claim their property rights over their personal data? New technologies emerge to empower consumers to control their own data, and the service provider may need to compensate for the usage of such data. How consumers and the service provider should react to such technologies, however, is not clear. In the first study, we build a theoretical model in which consumers have different sensitivities towards their data ownership. We show that the impact of the data ownership shift depends not only on the service provider’s revenue structure and the discount in the service quality offered to non-data-providing consumers, but also on whether and how consumers are compensated. More importantly, if the service provider can endogenously adjust the qualities of services provided to consumers, the shift of data ownership may not necessarily benefit consumers, or harm the service provider. We also offer guidelines for data regulation policy designs.
Essay 2: Re-creation or Co-creation? Copyright Protection in the Era of Information Good Production
Digital technology has accelerated the spread of the UGC among users and made our time more fragmented, which led to the popularity of short videos on the UGC platform, such as Douyin, Bilibili, and YouTube. A typical short video that attracts users is movie clips (or movie commentary) recreated by uploaders. Based on popular movies or TV, the recreators recombine them with their own narrating. It is convenient for the users to watch the movie quickly. The massive traffic from the secondary creation industry has become a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it promotes the spread of original information goods. On the other hand, piracy from secondary creation is one of the most important issues facing providers of original information goods. The booms of secondary creation will cannibalize the market of original information goods. To solve the problem of secondary creation and the curse of piracy, we build an analytical model to study what's the impact of secondary creation on the original information goods market, such as film, songs and other forms of video content. We study the economic implications of the competition between the original movie producer and the re-creator under three different cases: (1), the re-creator provides a re-created product without penalty; (2), the original producer may identify the re-creator’s re-creating behavior, such that the re-creator incurs penalty; (3), the original producer charges a royalty fee for the re-creation.
| Date of Award | 12 Sept 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Jingjun David XU (Supervisor) & Juan FENG (Supervisor) |