Privacy Is Precious: On the Attempt to Lift Anonymity on the Internet to Increase Revenue
Tobias Regner and
Gerhard Riener
Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 2017, vol. 26, issue 2, 318-336
Abstract:
We investigate the effect of a reduction of anonymity on consumers' purchase decisions (whether to buy, and if so how much to pay) at an online music store with Pay‐What‐You‐Want (PWYW)‐like pricing and in an Internet experiment mimicking the real world situation. Revealing the customer's name, e‐mail, and payment to the artist (seller) led to insignificantly higher payments, although it drastically reduced the number of customers purchasing. Overall, the regime led to a revenue loss of 25%. In the online experiment, revenue drops by 35%. These results suggest that the positive effect of reduced anonymity, previously established for donation or public goods contexts, does not extend to a consumption environment. Instead, the substantial opt‐out of customers is likely to be motivated by concerns about privacy.
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11) Track citations by RSS feed
Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jems.12192
Related works:
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:bla:jemstr:v:26:y:2017:i:2:p:318-336
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... ref=1058-6407&site=1
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Journal of Economics & Management Strategy from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().