Contextual Consent: Externalities and Governance on Digital Platforms

Privacy law evaluates consent one prompt at a time. On digital platforms that view is incomplete: users meet repeated requests through a shared interface, and each choice can shift the next. This article treats consent as a platform-mediated market process, using panel data from a leading global all-round service platform together with a randomized field experiment in the same environment. What a screen-by-screen focus misses is that consent decisions do not stay local; they spill across the pla