The 375th Wenlan Financial Forum

Abstract: In the context of the digital economy, personal information has increasingly become a critical production factor for platform firms in algorithm training,precision recommendation, and business decision-making.Consequently, the right to withdraw consent has emerged as a key institutional arrangement in the governance of personal information protection and data factor utilization.This paper develops a theoretical model incorporating consumer heterogeneity in privacy costs, platform pricing,data revenue, and withdrawal costs,and compares the equilibrium outcomes and welfare effects under three market structures—monopoly,competition, and social optimum—across three regimes:no consent-withdrawal mechanism,exogenous consent-withdrawal mechanism,and endogenous consent-withdrawal mechanism.The findings show that the governance effect of the right to withdraw consent does not depend on the mere formal granting of such a right,but rather on the relative relationships among the marginal revenue of data,the marginal cost of privacy, and the cost of withdrawal. The right to withdraw can, to some extent, decouple service participation from data retention decisions,thereby enhancing consumers’ control over their data.However,when withdrawal costs are high,platforms may still reshape consumer behavior through pricing strategies or interface design, leading to participation distortions and welfare losses.Furthermore,when withdrawal costs become a strategic variable for platforms,competition does not necessarily improve data utilization efficiency; in some cases, it may instead reduce incentives for data use that have positive net social benefits,resulting in a “de-datafication” equilibrium.This paper argues that privacy governance in digital platforms should not be equated simply with strengthening the right to withdraw or minimizing data retention. Instead,it requires a dynamic balance among the enforceability of the withdrawal right,the structure of market competition,and the efficiency of data utilization.Regulatory policies should focus on standardizing platforms’ withdrawal procedures while adopting differentiated governance based on data value and industry characteristics,so as to reconcile personal information protection with the realization of data value.

Speaker Introduction：

Jie Zheng is a Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the Center for Economic Research, Shandong University. He is a Distinguished Expert of the "Taishan Scholars Program" of Shandong Province and a Young Scholar of the "Changjiang Scholars Program" of the Ministry of Education. He also serves as the Director of the Center for Research in Experimental and Theoretical Economics (CREATE) at Shandong University. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Economics from Tsinghua University, as well as an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Washington, USA. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and has served as a Guest Editor for several SSCI/SCI-indexed journals. His research fields include information economics, experimental economics, behavioral economics, and industrial organization. He has led multiple projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (all concluded with consecutive "Outstanding" evaluations) and has delivered keynote speeches and invited presentations at numerous academic conferences.