Privacy-Preserving Signals
Econometrica · 2024 · Volume 92 · Issue 6
Abstract
A signal isprivacy-preservingwith respect to a collection ofprivacy setsif the posterior probability assigned to every privacy set remains unchanged conditional on any signal realization. We characterize the privacy-preserving signals for arbitrary state space and arbitrary privacy sets. A signal is privacy-preserving if and only if it is a garbling of areordered quantile signal. Furthermore, distributions of posterior means induced by privacy-preserving signals are exactly mean-preserving contractions of that induced by thequantile signal. We discuss the economic implications of our characterization for statistical discrimination, the revelation of sensitive information in auctions and price discrimination.
Keywords
Privacy-preserving signal, privacy sets, independence, reordered quantile signal, protected characteristics
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.