Providing personal information to the benefit of others

Abstract

Personal information is a precious resource, not only for commercial interests but also for the public benefit. Reporting personal location data, for example, may aid efficient traffic flows and sharing one's health status may be a crucial instrument of disease management. We experimentally study individuals' willingness to contribute personal information to information-based public goods. Our data provide evidence that-compared to monetary contributions to public goods-information may be substantially under-provided. We show that the degree of information provision is strongly correlated to the information's implicit (emotional and cognitive) costs. Individual's reluctance to share personal information with high implicit, in particular emotional costs, may seriously limit the effectiveness of informationbased public goods.

Paying with your personal data: the insensitivity of private information provision to asymmetric benefits

“…Since the effort of contributing is very similar, the only difference between contributions in the two settings results from the psychological difference between contributing a neutral token (token-based treatments) or a personal information (information-based treatments). To ensure that the psychological effort of providing the personal information is as low as possible, we chose the cognitively least demanding personal questions that we had tested in a previous study (Rockenbach et al, 2020). The chosen questions also exhibited the lowest degree of ethical conflict.…”

“…The type of personal information that we ask for is most comparable to the category of questions called "preferences" inBenndorf and Normann (2018). The information in that category was provided by almost all subjects in that study, resembling high willingness to provide similar information inRockenbach et al (2020).4 In an early experimental study,Poindexter et al (2006) use variations of scenario-type questionnaires to assess the preferences for different data safety measures Tsai et al (2011). experimentally test whether a more transparent presentation of privacy requirements and risks leads to more informed online-shop choices Feri et al (2016).…”

“…Our questions, however, are simple and deliberately chosen to keep the cognitive and social cost of answering as low as possible. The questions are pretested and reported inRockenbach et al (2020). We asked subjects to reveal their gender, their eye color, their age, their subject of study, their shoe size, their study duration, their body height, their zip code, the frequency of returning clothes to a shop while falsely claiming that they were unused, and the frequency of overdrawing the bank account.…”

Sharing versus donating: The role of message framing in consumers' private information disclosure for societal benefits

“…water, and weather (GEO, 2015;Hulsen, 2020;Rockenbach et al, 2020;Wagner et al, 2018). One estimate suggests that if information sharing happens freely across the world, the research and development speed will be immediately doubled or even tripled (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2008).…”

“…Nowadays, people commonly disclose private data to enjoy the benefits and convenience of data‐driven services, such as personalized user interfaces and targeted content recommendations (Wirth et al, 2020). The value of information sharing is realized in terms of not only economic savings (e.g., cheaper car rentals and lodging) (Hamari et al, 2015) but also societal benefits in fields such as agriculture, biodiversity, climate, disasters, ecosystems, energy, health, water, and weather (GEO, 2015; Hulsen, 2020; Rockenbach et al, 2020; Wagner et al, 2018). One estimate suggests that if information sharing happens freely across the world, the research and development speed will be immediately doubled or even tripled (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2008).…”