Personal Data as a Price in Market Definition: A Brief Assessment

Services offered by Google, Facebook, and their kin are not truly free: users contribute to the monetization of the platform. The question is not whether a market can be defined for zero-price services, but rather how this should be done. This short piece assesses whether personal data can be conceptualized as a price, to enable a substitution analysis for zero-price services. To do so, the piece focuses on the notion of price and its role in quantitative substitution analysis (when consumers re