Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2510.26727

Neither Consent nor Property: A Policy Lab for Data Law

Haoyi Zhang·Tianyi Zhu
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Regulators currently govern the AI data economy based on intuition rather than evidence, struggling to choose between inconsistent regimes of informed consent, immunity, and liability. To fill this policy vacuum, this paper develops a novel computational policy laboratory: a spatially explicit Agent-Based Model (ABM) of the data market. To solve the problem of missing data, we introduce a two-stage methodological pipeline. First, we translate decision rules from multi-year fieldwork (2022-2025) into agent constraints. This ensures the model reflects actual bargaining frictions rather than theoretical abstractions. Second, we deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) as "subjects" in a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE). This novel approach recovers precise preference primitives, such as willingness-to-pay elasticities, which are empirically unobservable in the wild. Calibrated by these inputs, our model places rival legal institutions side-by-side to simulate their welfare effects. The results challenge the dominant regulatory paradigm. We find that property-rule mechanisms, such as informed consent, fail to maximize welfare. Counterintuitively, social welfare peaks when liability for substantive harm is shifted to the downstream buyer. This aligns with the "least cost avoider" principle, because downstream users control post-acquisition safeguards, they are best positioned to mitigate risk efficiently. By "de-romanticizing" seller-centric frameworks, this paper provides an economic justification for emerging doctrines of downstream reachability.

Explore related subjects

econ.GNcs.CYq-fin.EC

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Haoyi Zhang, Tianyi Zhu. 2026-04-20. Neither Consent nor Property: A Policy Lab for Data Law. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26727

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Local Media and the Shaping of Social Norms: Evidence from the Ebola outbreak

Media's influence on norms and behavior is widely recognized. Less is known about the role played by media being local. I examine this in a high-stakes context, the Ebola outbreak in Guinea. I exploit quasi-random variation in access to radio and the timing of a public-health campaign aired on community radio. I find that 12-17% of Ebola cases could have been prevented if places with access to a neighboring community radio station had instead had their own. Impacts are driven by radio being local rather than by ethno-linguistic belonging. Local media facilitates coordination in behaviors observed and sanctioned locally.

econ.GN↗
arXiv2026

Productivity Shocks and Input Misallocation: A Decomposition

This paper asks how much input misallocation productivity uncertainty generates and at which stage of input decisions it arises. I separate revenue productivity by when each component is revealed and trace each into the gap between an input's marginal revenue product and its price. In six European countries, shocks revealed after an input is committed account for 20 percent of capital gap dispersion and 5 percent of labor gap dispersion. An unanticipated one percent rise in productivity raises the capital gap by 0.92 percent and the labor gap by 0.19 percent, because most of the shock passes into the wage.

econ.GN↗
arXiv2026

When Do Type-Specific Wages Buffer Distributional Incidence in TANK?

When do relative wages buffer the unequal incidence of aggregate shocks? I derive a consumption-gap decomposition and a present-value condition for partial offset in a TANK model. An extension separates wage-setting demand elasticity from substitution between labor segments and allows each segment to contain both financial types. With a zero inherited wage gap and a same-sign discounted wedge, substitution above one gives offsetting earnings reallocation; substitution below one gives amplification. The channel disappears when financial types have identical segment exposure. Numerical experiments assess these mechanisms, shock persistence, policy feedback, and aggregate-IRF matching. In the nested perfect-alignment monetary benchmark, the peak consumption gap is about two-fifths smaller under type-specific wages than under the common-wage closure. These are conditional model comparisons, not empirical effect estimates or welfare rankings.

econ.GN↗