Nuisance Letters? E-Mail Newsletters, Privacy, and the Market for Data

We study the market for data in the context of online retail newsletters, where consumers sell data in exchange for a discount. On the firm side, data on over 2,000 firms show a convergence towards a 5-10% discount equilibrium. Focusing on the user side, we conduct a survey with over 500 participants where we find substantial heterogeneity among consumers with respect to newsletter preferences and strategies. When we vary nuisance and privacy as key newsletter characteristics in a vignette experiment, the share of consumers who demand a higher-than-usual discount for subscription increases significantly when privacy is low-although actual subscription behavior remains unchanged. Allowing consumers to interact with a privacy tool to analyze real-world newsletters sparks substantial engagement and interest among survey participants: 63% choose to analyze more newsletters than they had originally been assigned. Our findings call for more accessible information on newsletter features.