EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Who should decide how much information to collect?

Youping Li and Jianhu Zhang

Oxford Economic Papers, 2025, vol. 77, issue 1, 256-270

Abstract: This article examines the tradeoffs concerning the collection and disclosure of personal information and considers either the seller or the buyers choosing how much information to collect. We identify two channels through which having heterogeneous buyers make the decision increases social welfare: the full internalization of privacy costs and the customized choice of information levels. Perhaps surprisingly, the buyers voluntarily provide more information than what is mandatorily collected particularly when privacy is a significant concern, which often benefits the seller. Consumer and total welfare are increased with buyers choosing how much information to collect unless the external value of information is sufficiently large relative to the buyers’ privacy cost and heterogeneity in valuation. Given the growing privacy concerns surrounding personal data, our analysis supports offering consumers the autonomy, which can result in a Pareto improvement.

Keywords: information collection; information disclosure; privacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 K2 L1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpae025 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:77:y:2025:i:1:p:256-270.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Economic Papers is currently edited by James Forder and Francis J. Teal

More articles in Oxford Economic Papers from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:77:y:2025:i:1:p:256-270.