Beyond Digital Rights: An Institutional Architecture for Consumer Empowerment

Dennis Snower, Paul Twomey and Vicente Arias

No 22036, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Digital governance has substantially expanded consumers' formal rights over personal data, yet these rights often fail to translate into effective agency in digital markets. We identify this as an institutional capability gap: individual consumers lack the information, expertise, accountability mechanisms, and bargaining capacity required to exercise legal rights continuously and economically effectively. We develop the Innovation in the Digital Economy Architecture (IDEA) as an institutional response. Rather than proposing additional substantive rights, IDEA integrates four mutually reinforcing mechanisms: consumer control over personal data anchored by verified Key Personal Data; accredited expert representation; fiduciary governance of delegated authority; and collective negotiation over data-processing arrangements. The novelty lies not primarily in these mechanisms individually, each of which has institutional precedents, but in their complementarity within a single governance architecture: control enables authorisation, representation supplies expertise, fiduciary duties discipline delegation, and collective negotiation converts dispersed rights into organised market agency. IDEA thereby shifts digital governance from reliance predominantly on individual consent and ex-post regulatory enforcement toward continuing institutionalised consumer participation. By embedding consumer agency within market processes, the framework seeks to make trustworthy data governance a dimension of competition and innovation. The paper contributes an institutional theory of digital consumer empowerment linking information systems, digital governance, institutional economics, and market design.

Keywords: Consumer empowerment; Digital governance; Institutional architecture; Personal data governance; Key Personal Data; Fiduciary duties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 D82 K24 L14 L86 O33 O38 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10
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