Cyber Alliance Talk – Wed 10/21
Valuing Intrinsic and Instrumental Preferences for Privacy by BU Questrom Assistant Prof. Tesary Lin
— This Cyber Alliance talk featuring Marketing Prof. Tesary Lin centers on her paper, in which she empirically separates two motives for consumers to protect privacy: an intrinsic motive, which is a “taste” for privacy; and an instrumental motive, which reflects the expected economic losses from revealing one’s private information to data collectors. Prof. Lin found that intrinsic preferences for privacy are highly heterogeneous. Consumers who choose to withhold their personal data are often systematically different from those who share; this systematic correlation between consumer characteristics and their privacy choices is called “self-selection into data sharing.”
However, the self-selection pattern can often deviate from the “nothing-to-hide” argument, a prediction given by models with pure instrumental preferences. Prof Lin’s research shows how taking this more complex selection pattern into account can avoid erroneous inferences on consumers when researchers try to learn about consumers using personal and voluntarily shared data.
Bio: Tesary Lin is an assistant professor of marketing at the Questrom School of Business at BU. Her research focuses on how information and data moderate the relationship between firms and consumers. She is particularly interested in consumer privacy preferences, the impact of privacy policies, and analytics tools that adapt to the modern information environment. Prior to joining BU Questrom, Tesary worked at Microsoft Research (Chief Economist Office) as well as JD Silicon Valley Lab (Applied Economics Team). She obtained her PhD in quantitative marketing at the University of Chicago.
Click here for Prof. Lin’s paper.