We study how an opt-in regime of privacy regulation, which limits the scope for online price discrimination, affects product quality and consumer surplus. When consumers decide to share personal data, they benefit from the complementarity between information and quality, but they pay personalized prices instead of a uniform price. We find that, if the complementarity is strong enough, then product quality is higher with than without the opt-in regime. Privacy regulation may have conflicting effects on consumers with different attitudes towards privacy, and an increase in quality is necessary to improve total consumer surplus. Interestingly, these results hold both under monopoly and imperfect product market competition. We thus recommend that privacy protection measures be grounded in the study of the relation between personal information and product quality.

我们研究了限制在线价格歧视范围的隐私监管选择机制如何影响产品质量和消费者剩余。当消费者决定共享个人数据时，他们受益于信息和质量之间的互补性，但他们支付的是个性化的价格而不是统一的价格。我们发现，如果互补性足够强，那么产品质量比没有选择加入制度要高。隐私监管可能对不同隐私态度的消费者产生相互冲突的影响，提高质量对于提高总消费者剩余是必要的。有趣的是，这些结果在垄断和不完全产品市场竞争下都成立。