Marketing & Public Policy II: Privacy, Sustainability, and Polarization
(A2026-133796)

AUTHORS

Klaus Miller, HEC Paris; Michelangelo Rossi, HEC Paris; MAX PACHALI, Tilburg University; BERND SKIERA, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany; Ozge Demirci, Imperial College London

ABSTRACT

Digital platforms, news media, and consumer markets face growing tensions between short-term performance and long-term outcomes. From pay-or-tracking walls and privacy regulation to plant-based adoption and polarizing content, the papers in this session examine how firm strategies and policy interventions shape consumer behavior and market outcomes. The first paper, Sizing the Market for Plant-Based Meat Replacements by Max Pachali (Tilburg), Bart Bronnenberg (Tilburg), and Thomas Otter (Goethe), estimates the market potential for plant-based meat replacements and identifies key behavioral constraints on adoption. Combining household purchase data with survey-based attitudes, the authors show that experiential barriers—especially perceived taste, texture, and cooking familiarity—drive most resistance to adoption. A structural demand model indicates that achieving taste parity could increase market share by over 6 percentage points. The second paper, Paying for Privacy: Pay-Or-Tracking Walls by Reinhold Kesler (DICE Düsseldorf), Klaus Miller (HEC Paris), Timo Müller-Tribbensee (Goethe), and Bernd Skiera (Goethe), examines how pay-or-tracking walls impact publisher profitability. Across three empirical studies, the authors show that pay-or-tracking walls are on average more profitable than cookie consent banners, but that small publishers and those with specialized content tend to profit less and may even incur losses. The third paper, In Privacy We Trust: The Effect of Privacy Regulations on Data Sharing Behavior by Ozge Demirci (Imperial), Ayelet Israeli (HBS), and Eva Ascarza (HBS), examines how state-level privacy regulation affects consumer willingness to share data. Using data from a U.S. receipt-upload platform, the authors find that new privacy laws in California and Virginia increased both the frequency and breadth of data sharing, particularly among previously reluctant users—suggesting that regulation can foster trust and participation in data-sharing ecosystems. Finally, Engagement vs. Commitment: The Economic Trade-Offs of Polarizing News Content by Shunyao Yan (Santa Clara University) and Klaus Miller (HEC Paris) examines how polarizing content affects engagement and subscriptions on a major European news platform. Using NLP and LLM-based polarization measures combined with instrumental variable approaches, the authors find that exposure to polarizing content raises engagement but reduces subscription probability—an effect driven more by affective than ideological polarization. Collectively, these papers demonstrate that consumer trust operates as a critical lever across policy-relevant domains. Whether firms seek to accelerate adoption of sustainable products, monetize user data responsibly, or cultivate loyal subscriber bases, success hinges on understanding how consumers respond to the trade-offs they face.