Our BSE Speaker Roland Strausz receives funding of 1.8 million euros from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project PRIVDIMA - Data Privacy in Digital Markets as part of the "Advanced Grants" program.
The PRIVDIMA project is focused on the regulation of data privacy in digital markets. It aims to investigate what type of regulation best protects consumers from the exploitation of their information and from price discrimination. The project criticizes that existing regulation, for example the GDPR, which mainly focuses on explicit consumer consent in relation to data collection, analysis and use, for example pop-ups when visiting a new website, falls short.
The project explains this by saying that data makes consumers' private characteristics "verifiable." However, although verifiability is considered an important factor in economic theory for the usability of information, it is not considered in current economic analyses of privacy measures.
"The main goal of the project is therefore to develop effective regulatory rules that protect consumers from exploitation of their data, taking verifiability into account. To this end, existing theories of regulatory design must first be extended to include the aspect of verifiability. The project thus includes both theoretical and applied components," says Roland Strausz.
ERC Advanced Grants support excellent and self-initiated research projects of leading researchers. Applicants must have significant research achievements over the last ten years. The maximum funding is 2.5 million euros for a period of five years with the possibility of an additional top-up of up to one million euros.
Press release of the European Research Council
Press release of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (in German)
