Regulatory Spillovers and Data Governance: Evidence from the GDPR

Christian Peukert (), Stefan Bechtold (), Michail Batikas and Tobias Kretschmer
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Christian Peukert: Department of Strategy, Globalization and Society, HEC Lausanne, Université de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Stefan Bechtold: Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, ETH Zürich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland

Marketing Science, 2022, vol. 41, issue 4, 746-768

Abstract: We document short-run changes in websites and the web technology industry with the introduction of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We follow more than 110,000 websites and their third-party HTTP requests for 12 months before and 6 months after the GDPR became effective and show that websites substantially reduced their interactions with web technology providers. Importantly, this also holds for websites not legally bound by the GDPR. These changes are especially pronounced among less popular websites and regarding the collection of personal data. We document an increase in market concentration in web technology services after the introduction of the GDPR: Although all firms suffer losses, the largest vendor—Google—loses relatively less and significantly increases market share in important markets such as advertising and analytics. Our findings contribute to the discussion on how regulating privacy, artificial intelligence and other areas of data governance relate to data minimization, regulatory competition, and market structure.

Keywords: privacy; competition policy; antitrust; internet regulation; regulatory competition; compliance risk; GDPR; Brussels effect; cookies; web tracking; data governance; data minimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormksc:v:41:y:2022:i:4:p:746-768

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