Theoretical Concepts of Consumer Resilience to Online Privacy Violation

Abstract

Resilience is a multifaceted concept used to explain both system and individual behavior across disciplines. Although definitions and research concepts of resilience vary significantly, resilience has become a boundary object in diverse academic fields calling for a holistic approach. This work aims to elaborate the theoretical concepts that might be applied in the research of consumer resilience to online privacy violation, a new and unexplored aspect of consumer behavior in the digital environment. The purpose of the research is to develop the future research frontiers in investigating consumer resilience to online privacy violation.It contributes to the privacy resilience debate and lays the groundwork for developing a conceptual model of online consumer resilience that would explore how individual behaviour is affected after online privacy violation occurrence. Developing a conceptual model of consumer resilience to online privacy violation that would include a set of individual and environmental variables, will contribute to the existing understanding of resilience at the intersection of psychology, economics, and privacy studies. Furthermore, it will also contribute to the understanding of adaptive responses of resilient individuals to privacy breaches in an online environment, as well as to the understanding of processes by which resilience affects adaptive responses of consumers in the specific context of online privacy breaches.