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Individuals’ concern for privacy, as a meaningful construct of interest, has been widely documented across a wide array of settings, including with respect to such domains as telemarketing and the use of do-not-call-lists (Dommeyer & Gross, 2003), e-commerce sites (Liu, Marchewka, Lu, & Yu, 2005), bricks-and-mortar retailers using RFID tags (Ohkubo, Suzuki, & Kinoshita, 2005), location identification (Katz, 2019), facial recognition technology to track shoppers (Ryski, 2019), travel (Tussyadiah, Li, & Miller, 2019), and activity on social-media sites (Osatuyi, 2015). Across all of these settings, it is clear that organizations need a better understanding of the factors that affect users’ concerns because their concerns likely affect their behaviors with respect to the organizations (Hong, Chan, & Thong, 2019); something that has been confirmed by previous research that has investigated the relationship between privacy concern and privacy-related intentions and behaviors (Jahangir & Begum, 2007; Kumar, Mohan, & Holowczak, 2008; Li, 2014). However, H. J. Smith, Dinev, and Xu (2011) concluded, from an extensive review of privacy literature, that what is still needed are more empirical studies that “focus on antecedents to privacy concerns and on actual outcome” (p. 989).
A number of outcomes have been investigated since the call by Smith, Dinev and Xu (2011); including willingness to disclose information (Bansal, Zahedi, & Gefen, 2016; Keith, Thompson, Hale, Lowry, & Greer, 2013; Taddicken, 2014), withdrawal behaviors (Choi, Park, & Jung, 2018; Dienlin & Metzger, 2016), technology-use intentions (Shin, 2010; Wang, Asaad, & Filieri, 2019), purchase behaviors (Fortes & Rita, 2016), and defensive behaviors (Ortiz, Chih & Tsai, 2018). However, there remains a dearth of research investigating the effect of privacy concern on users’ willingness to pay a fee to a service provider in exchange for a promise not to share personal information.
While some believe that users see privacy as a right (Floridi, 2005), others suggest that users view privacy as an asset that has economic value (Walsh, Parisi, & Passerini, 2017). Discussions about the ‘privacy paradox’ (Kokolakis, 2017; Taddicken, 2014); (Gerber, Gerber, & Volkamer, 2018), often center on instances when users report a high level of concern for privacy but also display a willingness to disclose information. The assumption is that users perform a risk-reward calculation of the potential costs of sharing information relative to the potential benefits of doing so. This suggests that users treat their information as a resource that can be exchanged for valued benefits; or as a resource that they may be willing to protect in exchange for a fee.