Is your privacy for sale? An experiment on the willingness to reveal sensitive information

• Published in: Games Vol. 10; no. 3; pp. 1 - 15
• Main Authors: Cloos, Janis, Frank, Björn, Kampenhuber, Lukas, Karam, Stephany, Möller, Daniel, Monge-Larrain, Maria, Nilgen, Marco, Rössler, Christoph
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI 01.09.2019; MDPI AG
• Subjects: Anchoring; Correlation analysis; Disclosure; donation experiment; Economics; Electronic commerce; Experiments; Factor analysis; personal data; Personal information; Prices; Privacy; Questions; Shopping; social disapproval; Social networks; Studies; Upper bounds; Valuation; Webcams; WTA experiment; Germany
• ISSN: 2073-4336; 2073-4336
• DOI: 10.3390/g10030028

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.