Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
Many organizations, such as banks and insurers, determine what services to offer based on a perceived quality of the recipient, e.g. their creditworthiness. Increasingly, organizations have access to new data about consumers, such as categorizations into demographic and lifestyle segments. When organizations learn about a consumer’s quality from the behavior of other consumers in the same segment—creating data linkages—what are the consequences for each consumer’s incentives to exert effort, e.g. to maintain a good credit rating? We study a multiple-agent career concerns model in which agents choose whether to interact with a principal and how much costly effort to exert. Data linkages create informational externalities across consumers, shaping participation rates and effort provision in equilibrium. We show that whether these are welfare-improving depends crucially on whether linkages are about quality (revealing correlations in underlying types) or about a shared circumstance (helping the principal to de-bias shared shocks to observed outcomes).
Please sign up for meetings here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Tf4YtDeDdmv3Dv379EyhWTL6lszs2Dy6yiff7yJeJAY/edit#gid=0