Susan Athey

Who they are

The 2017 NBER working paper lists Athey at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. With Christian Catalini and Catherine Tucker, she studied a 2014 experiment in which every undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was offered 100 dollars in bitcoin; 3,108 signed up. Half were randomly offered a free pizza for listing three friends' email addresses. Without the pizza, 5 per cent of students in that group gave only invalid addresses; with it, 2.5 per cent did, with little variation by stated privacy preference.

The paper reports three findings: small incentives change disclosure, small navigation costs such as the order in which options are listed change choices against stated preferences, and irrelevant but reassuring information makes people less likely to avoid surveillance.

Key papers

Athey, S., Catalini, C., & Tucker, C. (2017). "The digital privacy paradox: small money, small costs, small talk." NBER Working Paper 23488. doi:10.3386/w23488.

Key ideas

Small money, small costs and small talk move privacy choices. See The Privacy Paradox.

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