Impact of personalization on businesses and their stakeholders

Personalization — the tailoring of products, services, and interactions to individual users through data-driven models and algorithmic decision-making — has become a strategic axis for contemporary European firms, promising enhanced engagement, increased efficiency, and new pathways for value creation. This dissertation investigates the multifaceted economic, organizational, and stakeholder implications of personalization in two emblematic domains: healthcare and e-commerce. Combining theory from innovation studies and health economics with empirical evidence drawn from an extensive European multi-stakeholder research programme (PhilHumans) and original case analyses, the thesis maps current personalization practices, quantifies and qualifies the associated stakeholder risks, and examines the operational choices firms make when deploying personalized systems. Part I develops an integrated assessment of AI-enabled Personal Health Interfaces (PHIs), introducing a suite of benchmarks, experimental results, and qualitative data to reveal how personalization reshapes clinical workflows, patient engagement, and value distribution across providers and technology partners. Part II examines personalization in digital markets, with a focus on recommender platforms, gatekeeper practices, and systemic risks to competition, user autonomy, and market transparency. Across both domains, the dissertation identifies recurrent failure modes — including algorithmic bias, information asymmetries, value capture, and unintended externalities — and proposes a stakeholder-centric, fairness-aware governance framework that combines technical mitigations, organizational design, and regulatory alignment with EU instruments. The work presents a cross-sector taxonomy of personalization risks and business responses, along with empirical evidence and benchmarking artifacts for healthcare AI, as well as policy and managerial recommendations for aligning personalized innovation with the EU’s legal and ethical priorities.