Almaden Institute

A Microeconomic Approach to Privacy Abstract: As individuals increasingly take advantage of on-line services, the value of the private information they possess emerges as a problem of fundamental concern. We believe that the principal underlying privacy should be simple: individuals are entitled to control the dissemination of private information, disclosing it as part of a transaction only when they are fairly compensated. We show how this principle can be made precise in several diverse settings: in the use of marketing surveys by a vendor designing a product; and in the design of collaborative filtering and recommendation systems, where we seek to qualify the value of each user’s participation. Our approach draws on the analysis of coalition games making use of the core and Shapley value of such games as fair allocation principles.   Christos Papadimitriou - Bio  Christos Papadimitriou  Professor  Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley  christos@cs.berkeley.edu  Web Sites  http://www.cs.berkeley.edu~christos/ Biography I studied in Athens Polytechnic (BS in EE 1972) and Princeton (MS in EE, 1974 and Ph.D. in EECS, 1976). Since then, I have taught at Harvard, MIT, Athens Polytechnic, Stanford, and UC San Diego. I came to Berkeley in January 1996 (but I was here also in 1978 as a Miller fellow). I am interested in the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its applications to databases, optimization, AI, and game theory. I have written these books: Elements of the Theory of Computation (Prentice-Hall 1982, with Harry Lewis, second edition, September 1997). Click here for typos in the second edition. Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity (Prentice-Hall 1982, with Ken Steiglitz; second edition by Dover, 1998). The Theory of Database Concurrency Control (CS Press 1988). Computational Complexity (Addison Wesley, 1994) and Turing (a Novel about Computation), MIT Press, to appear in the summer of 2003; published in Greek as Turing’s smile.