Professor Zhang Jianhu’s Co-authored Paper Published in Oxford Economic Papers

Recently, the academic paper Who Should Decide How Much Information to Collect?, completed by Professor Zhang Jianhu from the School of Economics as the corresponding author, was officially published in Oxford Economic Papers (OEP), an international prestigious comprehensive economics journal published by Oxford University Press. The co-author is Professor Li Youping from the School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology.

At present, data has become a key element driving the development of the digital economy. In diverse consumption scenarios, consumers need to weigh providing more data in exchange for high-quality services or worrying about data leakage to third parties by merchants resulting in privacy damage. The core question discussed in this paper is: who should decide the amount of data collected—consumers or merchants? The study finds that the answer to this question depends on three key factors: consumers’ sensitivity to privacy, the external value of data, and the degree of heterogeneity among consumers. In particular, Pareto improvement can be achieved by letting consumers independently decide the amount of data when consumers have high heterogeneity, high sensitivity to privacy, or low external value of data. In view of the increasing global attention of consumers to privacy and the universality of consumer heterogeneity, the analysis of this paper provides strong theoretical support for regulations such as the Personal Information Protection Law of the People’s Republic of China (PIPL), the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the U.S. California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that tend to enhance consumers’ data decision-making power.

This research is a phased achievement of the General Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China "The Theoretical Basis, Action Path and Policy Suggestions of Data Portability Right Regulating Dominant Platforms" presided over by Professor Zhang Jianhu, and the Major Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China "Research on the Theory and Policy of Anti-monopoly in the Digital Economy" participated by him.

Zhang Jianhu is a Professor at the School of Economics, Shandong University. His research interests include platform competition, R&D competition, data elements and other industrial organization theory issues. He has published more than 20 academic papers in domestic and foreign journals such as Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Public Economic Theory, and Economic Research (Quarterly), and successively presided over three National Natural Science Foundation projects related to the digital economy.