The 1990s have seen a resurgence of interest in information privacy. Public opinion surveys show that many citizens are becoming greatly concerned about threats to their information privacy, with levels of such concern reaching all-time highs. Perhaps as a response to the growing concerns of citizens, the media are devoting more attention to privacy issues, and governmental regulation of the corporate privacy environment is increasing in many countries. Almost all developed countries have grappled with the trade-offs between open access to information-which enables economic efficiency-and an individual's right to privacy. Consistent with these trade-offs, many recent incidents suggest that regulatory approaches to information privacy, corporate management of personal data, and consumer reactions are becoming tightly interwoven around the world. To provide some insights into these relationships, we develop a conceptual model and test it with a cross-cultural sample from 19 different countries.In general, we find that a country's regulatory approach to the corporate management of information privacy is affected by its cultural values and by individuals' information privacy concerns. In addition, as governments become more involved in the corporate management of information privacy, internal management of such issues seems to tighten. This result supports previous observations that most firms take a primarily reactive approach to managing privacy by waiting for an external threat before crafting cohesive policies that confront their information practices. Moreover, when corporations are not perceived to adequately manage information privacy issues, and/or when privacy concerns rise, individuals are more inclined to prefer government intervention and be distrustful of firm self-regulation. As such, citizens may look to lawmakers to enact stricter regulation to reduce their privacy concerns. These findings and several international trends suggest that the self-regulatory model of privacy governance may not be sustainable over the long term.Findings from this research constitute an important contribution to the emerging theoretical base of information privacy research and should be particularly enlightening to those managing information privacy issues. Several directions for future research are also discussed.

The relationships among nationality, cultural values, personal information privacy concerns, and information privacy regulation are examined in this article.

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An aim of the Food and Drug Administration food labeling regulations is to ensure that manufacturers aid consumers in making choices regarding their diets by eliminating “hollow” health claims. Of particular concern are health claims made by one brand when the claim is inherent to the product category but has not been featured previously in advertisements or on packaging. There is concern that consumers will use information provided by one brand about such an attribute to infer that the other brands in the product category do not possess the attribute and thus be misled. Results from three experiments show that this practice can mislead consumers and affect consumer inferences, use of the target attribute, and choice in favor of the brands displaying the attribute. However, consumer understanding regarding the typicality of the attribute in the product category was improved when this practice was employed. Furthermore, it was shown that improved consumer education can be achieved without the deception associated with narrow (brand-specific) health claims by using broader (category-defined) claims. Finally, it was shown that an incentive should remain for manufacturers to use broader claims whenever consumers are likely to be choosing between alternatives from broadly defined product categories (e.g., cooking oils versus peanut oils).

This paper demonstrates that choice processing may be different in missing information situations than in full information situations depending on whether inferences are used to fill in missing values and the overlap of the missing information itself. It is shown that when individuals do not form inferences to fill in missing values, fewer full attribute-based processes and more processes which accommodate for missing attribute values, alternative-based or given-dimension attribute-based, are used. It is also shown that when a processing shift due to missing information does occur, the overlap of the missing values will affect the type of shift that takes place. If overlap is high, a shift to given-dimension attribute-based processing is more likely, and when overlap is low, a shift to alternative-based processing is more likely. When individuals do form inferences to fill in missing values, processing is more similar to that in full information situations. Finally, it is shown that individuals will often partially fill in missing information, thus moderating the proposed effects.