FairPersonalization · Personalized commercial practices and digital market manipulation: enhancing fairness in consumer protection
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-02-01 → 2022-07-31
- EU contribution
- €131,679
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Personalized commercial practices and digital market manipulation: enhancing fairness in consumer protection
It is widely acknowledged that the majority of business-to-consumer (B2C) interaction is based on consumer profiling and that individuals’ data are increasingly used as a tool to elaborate and deliver personalized products and services. With the development of automated analysis strategies and AI-based techniques, firms are able to personalize different aspects of commercial interaction, ranging from the modes of the offer—e.g., via behavioural advertising and microtargeting—to the prices and even the specific features of products. In general terms, it has been observed that these practices are—or at least can be—welfare-enhancing if they are properly regulated. At the same time, risks related to unregulated abuse of personalized commercial practices are present and significant: using personalizing technologies to match individual users to target audiences and even to create predictive profiles might result inter alia in violation of users’ data protection and privacy, unjust discrimination based on the analysis of protected factors, and manipulation of consumers’ decision making to the detriment of competitors. These risks operate at the crossroads of different interests and rights related to individuals and to the market as a whole; it is no surprise, therefore, that in recent times, profiling and microtargeting have found themselves at the centre of the scholarly and regulatory debate across the USA and Europe Building on, and expanding, existing literature, the project's goal was to the effects of tailored commercial practices on consumers behaviour, contextualizing and extending the results from the main theoretical and empirical studies on the impact of targeted and personalized offers, to pinpoint their risky consequences and ultimately improve and reinterpret the existing the regulatory framework. At the same time, the project aimed at investigating how the traditional legal notions of unfairness, deception, consent and awareness could have been developed to deal with the personalization of products.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Online commerce experienced a technological revolution, shifting towards automated, data-driven technologies for the allocation and display of offers and advertisings. Tailored and targeted commercial techniques constitute a heterogeneous phenomenon, incorporating ex multis semantics and data mining stemming from artificial intelligence, auction, social network, and neuroscience analyses, to reach different degrees of personalization. These innovations provide companies with new modes to gain market advantage and to offer their products: they have the possibility to study consumers and to personalize every aspect of their consumption experience. Consumers exposed to such potential situations could end up not being able to recognize the artificial reduction of their set of choices and, eventually, to oppose to it, being unaware of the way through which such messages utilize their habits, mental models and biases to influence their behaviours. The result of these and related trends is that firms can not only take advantage of a general understanding of cognitive limitations but also can uncover, and even trigger, consumer frailty at an individual level. I will a) investigate - by conducting online and laboratory experiments - how the use of online personalized and tailored offers affects the individual propensity to consume; b) redefine the normative thresholds and conditions under which tailored commercial practices should be qualified as unfair or manipulative under EU consumer law c) assess if, given the emergence of structural changes in consumption in the information society, it is still possible to hold up the idea that consumer protection can rely on its traditional theoretical notions and appraisal dynamics or if, on the contrary, these elements call for a substantial rethinking of the interplay between regulators, enterprises, and consumers.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM · AmsterdamCoordinatorNetherlands
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union