General Economics

• Replacements

See recent articles

Showing new listings for Friday, 21 August 2026

Replacement submissions (showing 4 of 4 entries)

[1] arXiv:2411.11589 (replaced) [pdf, other]

Title: The Impact of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on Online Usage Behavior

Klaus M. Miller, Bernd Skiera, Julia Schmitt

Subjects: General Economics (econ.GN)

Privacy regulations aim to safeguard consumers, but can have unintended consequences on how users interact with websites. This article estimates the causal effect of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on online usage behavior and decomposes it into usage frequency (unique visitors) and usage intensity (visits per unique visitor). Using a generalized synthetic control estimator across trillions of visits to 6,387 websites in 24 industries and 13 countries-11 months before and 19 months after enforcement-it compares observations subject to the GDPR (EU users or EU websites) with unaffected observations (non-EU users on non-EU websites). Weekly visits decline by 4.88% within 3 months and by 10.02%% after 18 months, with the decline increasingly driven by usage frequency: by 18 months, unique visitors decline by 6.61%, whereas visits per unique visitor decline by only 0.59%. The average conceals offsetting effects consistent with a reallocation of online activity: about one quarter of websites gain significantly, and among websites losing users, the remaining users engage more intensively, whereas intensity falls where user numbers grow. Losses concentrate among hedonic and smaller websites and continue to deepen during the first wave of data-protection enforcement actions rather than being concentrated around the GDPR compliance deadline. Taken together, these patterns are more consistent with restricted data-driven user acquisition and privacy salience, than with consent friction and degraded retention as persistent explanations. Long-horizon, decompositional evaluation thus reveals GDPR's differential effect on usage frequency/intensity and heterogeneous effects not distinguished by the aggregate traffic effects reported in prior work.

[2] arXiv:2509.14645 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]

Title: Are Final Market Prices Sufficient for Information Aggregation? Evidence from Last-Minute Dynamics in Parimutuel Betting

Hiroaki Hanyu, Shunsuke Ishii, Suguru Otani, Kazuhiro Teramoto

Comments: 19 pages with 26 pages appendix

Subjects: General Economics (econ.GN)

This study presents evidence challenging the practice of inferring risk preferences, probability perceptions, and beliefs from parimutuel betting markets, where wagers cannot be made contingent on final odds. Using interim odds from horse racing, we show that expected returns depend not only on final odds but also on the path through which they are reached: horses with final-five-minute odds declines earn higher realized returns than horses with similar final odds. We rationalize this path dependence using a two-period extension of the information-based model à la Ottaviani--Sørensen, in which final-stage odds declines arise from informed bettors' late wagers based on private signals. The model also highlights that final odds--return patterns alone may not distinguish information aggregation from probability distortions.

[3] arXiv:2607.23325 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]

Title: Happy Birthday? Age Labels, Search Criteria, and Matching from Dating to Marriage

Suguru Otani

Comments: 40 pages, 34 page appendix

Subjects: General Economics (econ.GN)

Age is a match trait and a prominent label on search platforms. Using confidential records from a large Japanese marriage platform, I study how a birthday age update affects consideration, applications, relationship progression, and engagement. Only displayed age updates at birthdays. Receivers enter some acceptable-age ranges as they exit others, leaving only modest overall eligibility changes. Application counts often increase. Applications shift from younger to older suitors. Proposal counts fall at nine of ten female receiver ages \(31\text{--}40\), with losses concentrated at entry into early dating. In stage-specific accounting for receivers in their thirties, the no-birthday proposal count is \(12.9\) percent above the benchmark for female receivers and \(6.7\) percent below it for male receivers; the younger-man share in the female-receiver channel is \(4.8\) percentage points higher. Age labels and filters are not neutral windows onto preferences: they govern who marries whom and how many marriages form.

[4] arXiv:2608.12143 (replaced) [pdf, html, other]

Title: Robustness over efficiency in climate coalitions: a bistable model and a map of architectures

Juergen Renn (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany)

Comments: v3: exact game-theoretic gap throughout; outsider drain decomposed into a trade-law-capped fiscal channel and a compensated terms-of-trade channel; regime map, entropy prototype, and a comparative-dynamics framing added; presentation revised. Companion policy paper: SSRN 7276818. Code: doi:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21906160

Subjects: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); General Economics (econ.GN)

Designs for international climate cooperation face a trade-off between efficiency and robustness to institutional erosion by defection, renegotiation, and political turnover. We formalize this trade-off in a stylized coalition-formation game with two market-based enrolment channels, a membership premium and an outsider drain, stabilized against bounded perturbations with robust control. The free-rider gap is exact within the game, expressed in measurable primitives, and separated from the architecture-specific channels. The drain is decomposed into a fiscal border channel, capped by trade law at the rent it mirrors, and a compensated terms-of-trade channel, making every channel strength measurable. With sufficiently strong channels the model is bistable: a remnant club and a near-universal coalition are separated by a critical mass. For a newly proposed carbon currency, whose emission rights are reissued each period, extinguished upon use, and enforced at the border, the minimal nucleus is thirty per cent of global emissions, ignition from an EU-China nucleus requires compensating one fifth to three fifths of the outsiders' terms-of-trade loss, the established coalition withstands two to four times the perturbation admissible at ignition, and the tipping survives heterogeneity to about three times the membership premium. Two robustness coordinates place each architecture in a map with three regimes, opening a comparative dynamics of climate clubs: the carbon currency is self-igniting, the border adjustment founding-dependent, the export rebate permanent-support-dependent. Architectures without a drain improve efficiency within a coalition but cannot drive its formation. Robustness governs whether cooperation forms and endures; efficiency decides how much an established coalition delivers.