Privacy concerns, voluntary disclosure of information, and unraveling: An experiment

Volker Benndorf, Dorothea Kübler and Hans-Theo Normann

No 2013-040, SFB 649 Discussion Papers from Humboldt University Berlin, Collaborative Research Center 649: Economic Risk

Abstract: We study the voluntary revelation of private, personal information in a labor-market experiment with a lemons structure where workers can reveal their productivity at a cost. While rational revelation improves a worker's payo , it imposes a negative externality on others and may trigger further unraveling. Our data suggest that subjects reveal their productivity less frequently than predicted in equilibrium. A loaded frame emphasizing personal information about workers' health leads to even less revelation. We show that three canonical behavioral models all predict too little rather than too much revelation: level-k reasoning, quantal-response equilibrium, and to a lesser extent inequality aversion.

Keywords: information revelation; privacy; lemons market; level-k reasoning; quantal response equilibrium; inequality aversion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C90 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/91591/1/SFB649DP2013-040.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Privacy concerns, voluntary disclosure of information, and unraveling: An experiment (2015)
Working Paper: Privacy concerns, voluntary disclosure of information, and unraveling: An experiment (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:sfb649:sfb649dp2013-040

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SFB 649 Discussion Papers from Humboldt University Berlin, Collaborative Research Center 649: Economic Risk Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().