← Search

The Value of Privacy Assurance: An Exploratory Field Experiment1

Kai-Lung Hui¹; Hock-Hai Teo²; Sang‐Yong Tom Lee³

¹ Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, 88 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China · ² Department of Information Systems, National University of Singapore, 3 Science Drive, Singapore 117543, Singapore · ³ College of Information and Communications, Hanyang University, 17 Haengdang-Dong, Seongdong-gu, Seoul 133-791, Korea

This paper reports the results of an exploratory field experiment in Singapore that assessed the values of two types of privacy assurance: privacy statements and privacy seals. We collaborated with a local firm to host the experiment on its website with its real domain name, and the subjects were not informed of the experiment. Hence, the study provided a field observation of the subjects’ behavioral responses toward privacy assurances. We found that (1) the existence of a privacy statement induced more subjects to disclose their personal information but that of a privacy seal did not; (2) monetary incentive had a positive influence on disclosure; and (3) information request had a negative influence on disclosure. These results were robust in other specifications that used alternative measures for some of our model variables. We discuss this study in relation to the extant privacy literature, most of which employs surveys and laboratory experiments for data collection, and draw related managerial implications.

DOI

10.2307/25148779

Volume

31 (1)

Pages

19-33

Language

en

Export

BibTeX

Sources

crossref openalex