Big Data, Competition and Privacy

The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple (GAFA, for short) are the most profitable companies in the global economy and their market power is based on the vast amount of information collected. Individuals benefit from disclosing their personal information in the form of target advertising, personalized prices or reduced searching costs. However, such disclosure implies a privacy cost suffered by consumers increasingly concerned about their privacy. Hence, the phenomenon of big data raises interdisciplinary concerns ranging from competition, to consumer protection and privacy. The thesis aims to conduct a critical literature analysis over data linked with traditional branches of economic literature, including monopoly and perfect competition, switching costs, the commons and anti-commons literature, and models of data trade. Finally, once analyzed the traditional assumptions of data selling markets, we have tried to develop a two-stage game modelling the sale of information among a monopolistic data broker and two competing firms.