Contribution to the economics of privacy and financial data.

Summary This thesis studies the economic consequences of consumers controlling the amount of personal data they are willing to share with firms. This topic is of vital importance to the digital economy as many firms collect and use consumer information afin order to increase their profits. However, these firms may face increasing difficulties in generating profits from personal data. First, more and more consumers are concerned about their online privacy. Second, a growing number of tools are available to control the collection of personal data. We show in the thesis that the use of such tools have a positive effect on consumers' willingness to share their personal information, thus enabling more privacy-friendly data collection. These findings also apply to the topic of financial data. Encouraging the use of non-bank payment methods (and thus allowing consumers to hide information from banks) could be beneficial to online commerce, leading consumers to make more purchases. Infin a context where consumers are concerned about their privacy, banks could benefit from making their screening practices less intrusive, as it would make their credit policies more effective.