# Consumer Consent Regulation

## TL;DR

This paper argues that consumer consent regulations alone are not enough to prevent price discrimination because companies can exploit loopholes by offering unattractive terms.

## Contribution

The paper introduces the novel idea that consent regulation must explicitly control firms' dissent offers to be effective.

## Key findings

- Consent regulation alone allows firms to exploit dissenting consumers through unattractive offers.
- Regulation must explicitly control firms' dissent offers to be effective.
- Sequential rationality standards for offers are insufficient for protecting consumers.

## Abstract

Consumer consent regulation is the cornerstone of modern data privacy regulation such as the European GDPR and the Californian CCPA. By ensuring that consumers can reject any harmful data collection, the regulation seems an effective tool for protecting consumers against price discrimination. By contrast, I provide the insight that consent regulation alone is ineffective because it provides firms with the loophole to commit to unattractive offers to dissenting consumers. Effective consent regulation therefore requires an explicit regulation of the firm’s dissent offer. This is informationally demanding; regulation that merely insists on “reasonable” (sequential rational) offers is ineffective.