Is Your Privacy for Sale? An Experiment on the Willingness to Reveal Sensitive Information

Janis Cloos, Björn Frank, Lukas Kampenhuber, Stephany Karam, Nhat Luong, Daniel Möller, Maria Monge-Larrain, Nguyen Tan Dat, Marco Nilgen and Christoph Rössler
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Lukas Kampenhuber: School of Business and Economics, University of Marburg, Am Plan 1, 35032 Marburg, Germany
Stephany Karam: School of Business and Economics, University of Marburg, Am Plan 1, 35032 Marburg, Germany
Nhat Luong: Institute of Economics, University of Kassel, Nora-Platiel-Str. 4, 34127 Kassel, Germany
Daniel Möller: School of Business and Economics, University of Marburg, Am Plan 1, 35032 Marburg, Germany
Maria Monge-Larrain: Institute of Economics, University of Kassel, Nora-Platiel-Str. 4, 34127 Kassel, Germany
Nguyen Tan Dat: School of Business and Economics, University of Marburg, Am Plan 1, 35032 Marburg, Germany
Marco Nilgen: School of Business and Economics, University of Marburg, Am Plan 1, 35032 Marburg, Germany
Christoph Rössler: School of Business and Economics, University of Marburg, Am Plan 1, 35032 Marburg, Germany

Games, 2019, vol. 10, issue 3, 1-15

Abstract: We investigate whether individuals’ self-stated privacy behavior is correlated with their reservation price for the disclosure of personal and potentially sensitive information. Our incentivized experiment has a unique setting: Information about choices with real implications could be immediately disclosed to an audience of fellow first semester students. Although we find a positive correlation between respondents’ willingness to accept (WTA) disclosure of their private information and their stated privacy behavior for some models, this correlation disappears when we change the specification of the privacy index. Independent of the privacy index chosen we find that the WTA is significantly influenced by individual responses to personal questions, as well as by different decisions to donate actual money, indicating that the willingness to protect private information depends on the delicacy of the information at stake.

Keywords: privacy; personal data; social disapproval; WTA experiment; donation experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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