A conversation between PEP Director James C. Cooper and Professor Alessandro Acquisti.

Alessandro Acquisti is the Trustees Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. His research combines economics, behavioral research, and data mining to investigate the role of privacy in a digital society. His studies have promoted the revival of the economics of privacy, advanced the application of behavioral economics to the understanding of consumer privacy valuations and decision-making, and spearheaded the investigation of privacy and disclosures in social media.

Ginger Zhe Jin is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the ADVANCE Professor of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University since September 2021. Most of her research focuses on information asymmetry among economic agents and how to provide information to overcome the information problem. The applications she has studied include retail food safety, health insurance, prescription drugs, e-commerce, regulatory inspection, scientific innovation, air quality, blood donation, vaccination, intrafamilial interaction, data regulation, and consumer protection. She is currently co-editor of Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, associate editor of RAND Journal of Economics, advisory council member of Journal of Industrial Economics, and board member of Industrial Organization Society. She has been Research Associate of NBER since 2012.

Liad Wagman is the John and Mae Calamos Dean Endowed Chair and professor of economics and at Stuart School of Business at Illinois Tech. Wagman works on topics in the areas of information economics, industrial organization, law and economics, and entrepreneurship, studying issues concerning market competition and antitrust, data utilization and privacy, innovation, and new venture financing. Wagman is a Competition Fellow at the Data Catalyst Institute, and was Senior Economic and Technology Advisor of the Federal Trade Commission’s Office of Policy Planning, a Visiting Associate Professor of Executive Education and Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, a Visiting Scholar at the Duke University Economics Department, a research fellow at the Duke University Computer Science Department, and a research fellow at the Duke University Social Sciences Research Institute

Garrett Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Boston University, Questrom School of Business. Prof. Johnson’s research on Internet Marketing examines online display advertising: the medium’s effectiveness and privacy issues. His ad effectiveness research uses large-scale experiments to measure how and how much ads work. His privacy research quantifies the value of online behavioral targeting to industry and considers the impact of policy & self-regulatory approaches. Prof. Johnson works with Internet companies—including Google and Yahoo!—to answer these questions with Internet-scale data. For his work, Prof. Johnson has been awarded the Paul Green Award and has been a finalist for both the John D.C. Little Award and the Gary Lilien Marketing Science Practice Prize.

Research Papers:
Samuel Goldberg, Garrett Johnson & Scott Shriver, Regulating Privacy Online: An Economic Evaluation of the GDPR (Law & Economics Center at George Mason University Scalia Law School Research Paper Series No. 22-025, 2022).
Samuel Goldberg, Garrett Johnson & Scott Shriver, Privacy & Market Concentration: Intended & Unintended Consequences of the GDPR (September 21, 2022).

Sasha Romanosky is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, and former cyber policy advisor at the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy (OSDP). He researches the economics of security and privacy, national security, applied microeconomics, and law and economics. For example, he has examined whether data breach notification laws reduced consumer identity theft; when and how firms are more likely to be sued when they suffer a data breach, and when they’re more likely to settle. He studied the cost of data breaches in order to understand whether corporate losses are really as severe as is commonly believed, and he collected a dataset of cyber insurance policies to examine how insurance carriers measure and price cyber risk. He has also studied private sector attribution of cyber incidents, and their impact to law enforcement, and the intelligence community. Romanosky was a research fellow in the Information Law Institute at New York University, and a security professional for over 10 years. He is one of the original coauthors of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), an open standard for scoring computer vulnerabilities, and EPSS, the Exploit Prediction Scoring System. While in DoD, he oversaw two of the Department’s most critical vulnerability programs, and advised on other matters related to cyber security and cyber policy. Romanosky holds a Ph.D. in public policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Calgary, Canada.

Jane Bambauer is a Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. Her research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, and questions the wisdom of many well-intentioned privacy laws. Her articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. She holds a BS in Mathematics from Yale College and a JD from Yale Law School.

James C. Cooper brings over a decade of public and private sector experience to his research and teaching. Prior to joining the faculty at Scalia Law, he served as Deputy and Acting Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Office of Policy Planning, Advisor to Federal Trade Commissioner William Kovacic, and as an associate in the antitrust group of Crowell & Moring, LLP. Professor Cooper returned to the FTC in 2018-19 to serve as a Deputy Director in the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. His research focuses on the law & economics of privacy, data security, and consumer protection, as well as on wide variety of topics surrounding competition policy, and it regularly appears in top academic journals, such as the Journal of Law & Economics, International Review of Law & Economics, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Antitrust Law Journal, and the Virginia Journal of Law & Technology. Professor Cooper has a BA from the University of South Carolina, received his PhD in economics from Emory University, and his law degree, magna cum laude, from the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where he was a Levy Fellow and a member of the George Mason Law Review.