Footnote:
In: Journal of Institutional Economics
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments December 1, 2020 erstellt
Description:
This article outlines the economic implications of the instability of the legal foundations of the personal-data-driven economy. For more than two decades, economic agents have been investing in the novel industry on the assumption that courts, the keepers of the legal systems, would have stably backed their claims by turning their technological control of personal data into legally protected property rights. Courts' backing has proved only temporary as they are now revising early solutions by constraining collection, use and trade of personal data to protect the hierarchically superior rights – e.g. privacy, antitrust, and democratic order. This article advances the theory of legal bubbles to rationalize the economics underlying the legal shock-waves affecting the personal data driven economy. Legal bubbles get to form when economic agents invest in the economic exploitation of a new resource, in the light of property rights solutions provisionally granted by courts in a context of uncertainty and ignorance about the legal implications of innovative activities. The legal foundations of the industry may eventually turn to be unstable as a result of courts' hindsight attempt to re-adapt the legal foundations of the market to the actual implications of unconstrained commodification, that were previously ignored. The theory cautions against the potential economic disruption generated by over-reliance on early and still in-adapted property rights solutions