The Effect of Privacy Regulation on the Data Industry: Empirical Evidence from GDPR

Guy Aridor, Yeon-Koo Che, Tobias Salz

NBER Working Paper No. 26900
Issued in March 2020, Revised in May 2021
NBER Program(s):Industrial Organization, Law and Economics

Utilizing a novel dataset from an online travel intermediary, we study the effects of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The opt-in requirement of GDPR resulted in 12.5% drop in the intermediary-observed consumers, but the remaining consumers are trackable for a longer period of time. These findings are consistent with privacy-conscious consumers substituting away from less efficient privacy protection (e.g, cookie deletion) to explicit opt out—a process that would make opt-in consumers more predictable. Consistent with this hypothesis, the average value of the remaining consumers to advertisers has increased, offsetting some of the losses from consumer opt-outs.

You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w26900