Generating additional household income from the traces of data that users give away each day still comes across as a bold and progressive idea. Can the active sharing and passive corporate tracking of a user's personal data be worth more than the offered digital service? How can the user as a data provider best negotiate with digital service providers to obtain a higher share of the monetary value generated by aggregated amounts of user data? And how easily can the users exert control over the personal data that they accumulated over time with a digital service provider and make use of alternative market offers in case the negotiations are not fruitful? In this dissertation, Stefan Mager starts exploring these questions for different scenarios of network architectures: (i) centralized networks with dominant gatekeepers, (ii) federated networks in which service provision and central data hosting is offered by distinct parties, (iii) fully distributed networks without central data hosting. His research suggests that well-crafted privacy regulation and technological development can play important roles in empowering users to get a higher value share from growing personal data records. In his empirical research contributions in this dissertation, Stefan Mager focuses on centralized networks as they are typical for the digital economy of the early 21st century. Using incentivized field experiments in collaboration with multiple firms, he examines - in the legal environment of the EU's privacy regulation regime - users' willingness to accept tracking for receiving a compensation in return for the provided observational data. Together with his co-authors, he further investigates the effectiveness of current data portability regulation in the EU and points to the frictions that users face when trying to export and import data between digital services.weiterlesen