The Law and Economics of Personalization

Imagine every ad, every price, and even every contract completely tailored to you - welcome to the age of AI-driven hyper-personalization.
Today, vast amounts of consumer data are collected and processed to build individualized profiles with ever-increasing precision. This enables one-to-one interactions that evolve in real time and allow firms to influence behavior with unprecedented subtlety. Personalized marketing holds the promise of meeting consumer needs more effectively and making digital experiences more relevant and efficient. Yet this seemingly customized environment raises urgent concerns about the power of such marketing to exploit cognitive biases, reshape preferences, and deepen asymmetries in digital markets.
This book offers the first in-depth law and economics analysis of personalized marketing in the digital age. It examines how personalized advertising, pricing, and contracting challenge foundational principles of consumer protection and explores to what extent these practices are regulated under the current EU legal framework. The analysis shows that while existing rules provide some safeguards, they fall short of addressing the systemic risks posed by hyper-personalization.
To respond to these challenges, the book develops a four-part policy approach aimed at reinforcing consumer autonomy, equity, and welfare in data-driven markets and bridging the regulatory gaps that personalization opens up.
Regulating these developments involves a clear trade-off between efficiency and fairness. How much freedom do you give up in exchange for a hyper-personalized experience? How confident are you that the price you pay will not exceed what others pay for the exact same service? And what does it mean for your autonomy when an algorithm predicts your behavior better than you do yourself?
This book offers a critical starting point for future regulation and a call to rethink the role of personalization in the digital economy.

Dr. Adrianus Johannes van Heusden is a lawyer-economist whose passion for law and economics runs like a red thread through his academic career. He holds two bachelor's degrees in Law and Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, as well as three master's degrees: an M.Sc. in Economics and Business (cum laude), an LL.M. in Commercial Law, both from Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a European Master in Law and Economics (EMLE, cum laude) from the Universities of Haifa, Ghent, and Aix-Marseille. In 2020, he won the Best Thesis Award for his thesis "The Impact of Branding on Boilerplates: A Law and Economics Analysis of Standard-Form Contracting." He completed his Ph.D. on the interplay between AI-driven marketing and consumer policy, conducting an in-depth analysis of the practice of personalized marketing. He was awarded an Erasmus Trustfonds Scholarship for his research, which facilitated a research stay at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. His areas of expertise include microeconomics, marketing, consumer law, and digital regulation, with a particular emphasis on the Digital Services Act (DSA). Currently, he works at the European Commission as the DSA Officer for the Netherlands. Adrianus is fluent in Dutch, Spanish, English, French, German, and Italian.