UC Irvine

Digital markets are built on data, low-friction access, and user trust. This dissertation studies what happens when each of these pillars is disrupted. Across three essays, it shows that privacy regulation, registration-based access barriers, and public revelations of workplace misconduct can materially alter consumer purchasing, attention allocation, and platform choice. The first essay examines the unintended consequences of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) for consumer commerce. Using the CCPA as a natural experiment and combining billions of payment transactions with browsing data and firm-level measures of advertising technologies, the essay shows that Californians purchased less, returned more, and spent more time browsing after the law took effect. Firms subject to the regulation also reduced their use of ad-related technologies. These findings suggest that stronger privacy protections may unintentionally weaken personalization and product-consumer matching, reducing commercial activity even as they expand consumers' control over personal data. The second essay studies the New York Times' introduction of a registration wall as a first-party data collection strategy. Using web browsing data together with a regional measure of privacy salience based on cumulative exposure to data breaches, the essay finds that registration walls generate heterogeneous responses across user segments. News-singlehomers reduce engagement after the wall is introduced, whereas news-multihomers slightly increase engagement. Higher privacy salience attenuates the decline among singlehomers and strengthens the positive response among multihomers. When users disengage, their attention shifts primarily toward search engines and video-sharing platforms, revealing broader ecosystem consequences of registration-based access barriers for news consumption. The third essay investigates how public whistleblowing about workplace sexual harassment and discrimination affects consumer demand in platform competition. Exploiting a blog post by a former Uber employee describing sexual harassment, discrimination, and the company’s response—an account that quickly went viral on social media—as an exogenous reputational shock, the essay shows that Uber usage declines while Lyft usage rises among riders most able to switch between the two platforms. These effects are strongest in markets with greater local attention to the event and among riders predicted to be female, highlighting how misconduct toward minorities can translate into meaningful demand-side consequences in consumer markets. Taken together, the three essays demonstrate that consumer behavior in digital markets is shaped not only by prices and product attributes, but also by data governance, access design, and corporate legitimacy. The dissertation contributes to research on privacy regulation, digital media monetization, and platform competition, while offering practical implications for firms and policymakers seeking to balance personalization, access, and accountability in the digital economy.