Keep them out of It! How information externalities affect the willingness to sell personal data online
Tim Friehe,
Leonie Gerhards and
Franziska Weber
Journal of Economic Psychology, 2025, vol. 109, issue C
Abstract:
When individuals provide their personal data online, they often disregard that this allows learning about others, too. Our large-scale online experiment reveals that individuals are less willing to provide personal data when sharing can compromise others’ privacy, entailing personalized price discrimination. Compared to a benchmark without data compromise, individuals’ willingness to sell data decreases when others’ data is compromised with 50% or 100% probability. By applying two well-studied interventions — peer effects and a social norm focus — we explore ways to mitigate excessive data sharing, laying the ground for policy design. While peer effects, on average, increase individuals’ willingness to provide personal data, making people reflect on the appropriate behavior appears to be a promising social nudge to reduce negative externalities.
Keywords: Privacy; Information externality; Social norms; Peer effects; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D30 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016748702500042X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
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:eee:joepsy:v:109:y:2025:i:c:s016748702500042x
DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2025.102830
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read
More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().