A Utility Theory of Privacy and Information Sharing

Abstract

Today enormous data storage capacities and computational power in the e-big data era have created unforeseen opportunities for big data hoarding corporations to reap hidden benefits from individuals' information sharing, which occurs bit by bit in small tranches over time. Behavioral economics describes human decision-making fallibility over time but has—to this day—not covered the problem of individuals' decisions to share information about themselves in tranches on social media and big data administrators being able to reap a benefit from putting data together over time and reflecting the individual's information in relation to big data of others.