We offer our thanks to the authors for their thoughtful comments. Cui, Gong, Hannig, and Hoffman propose a valuable improvement to our method of estimating lost entitlements due to data error. ...Because we don't have access to the unknown, "true" number of children in poverty, our paper simulates data error by drawing counterfactual estimates from a normal distribution around the official, published poverty estimates, which we use to calculate lost entitlements relative to the official allocation of funds. But, if we make the more realistic assumption that the published estimates are themselves normally distributed around the "true" number of children in poverty, Cui
.'s proposed framework allows us to reliably estimate lost entitlements relative to the unknown, ideal allocation of funds-what districts would have received if we knew the "true" number of children in poverty.
Purpose
This paper aims to examine how reversibility in disclosing personal information – that is, having (vs not having) to option to later revise or retract personal information – can impact ...consumers’ willingness to divulge personal information.
Design/methodology/approach
Three studies examined how informing consumers they may (reversible condition) or may not (irreversible condition) revise their personal information in the future affected their propensity to disclose personal information, compared to a control condition.
Findings
Study 1 (which included three experiments with different time intervals between initial and revised disclosure) showed that consumers disclose less in both the reversible and irreversible conditions, compared to the control condition. Studies 2 and 3 showed that this is because consumers treat reversibility as a cue to the sensitivity of the information they are asked to divulge, and that leads them to disclose less when reversibility or irreversibility is made explicitly salient beforehand.
Practical implications
As many marketers are interested in hoarding consumers’ personal information, privacy advocates call for methods that would ensure careful and well-informed disclosure. Offering reversibility to a decision to disclose personal information, or merely pointing out the irreversibility of that decision, can make consumers reevaluate the sensitivity of the situation, leading to more careful disclosures.
Originality/value
Although previous research on reversibility in consumer behavior focused on product return policies and showed that reversibility increases purchases, none have studied how reversibility affects self-disclosure and how it can decrease it.
Advancements in information technology often task users with complex and consequential privacy and security decisions. A growing body of research has investigated individuals' choices in the presence ...of privacy and information security tradeoffs, the decision-making hurdles affecting those choices, and ways to mitigate such hurdles. This article provides a multi-disciplinary assessment of the literature pertaining to privacy and security decision making. It focuses on research on assisting individuals' privacy and security choices with soft paternalistic interventions that nudge users toward more beneficial choices. The article discusses potential benefits of those interventions, highlights their shortcomings, and identifies key ethical, design, and research challenges.
New marketing paradigms that exploit the capabilities for data collection, aggregation, and dissemination introduced by the Internet provide benefits to consumers but also pose real or perceived ...privacy hazards. In four experiments, we seek to understand consumer decisions to reveal or withhold information and the relationship between such decisions and objective hazards posed by information revelation. Our central thesis, and a central finding of all four experiments, is that disclosure of private information is responsive to environmental cues that bear little connection, or are even inversely related, to objective hazards. We address underlying processes and rule out alternative explanations by eliciting subjective judgments of the sensitivity of inquiries (experiment 3) and by showing that the effect of cues diminishes if privacy concern is activated at the outset of the experiment (experiment 4). This research highlights consumer vulnerabilities in navigating increasingly complex privacy issues introduced by new information technologies.
Health information exchanges (HIEs) are healthcare information technology efforts designed to foster coordination of patient care across the fragmented U.S. healthcare system. Their purpose is to ...improve efficiency and quality of care through enhanced sharing of patient data. Across the United States, numerous states have enacted laws that provide various forms of incentives for HIEs and address growing privacy concerns associated with the sharing of patient data. We investigate the impact on the emergence of HIEs of state laws that incentivize HIE efforts and state laws that include different types of privacy requirements for sharing healthcare data, focusing on the impact of laws that include requirements for patient consent. Although we observe that privacy regulation alone can result in a decrease in planning and operational HIEs, we also find that, when coupled with incentives, privacy regulation with requirements for patient consent can actually positively impact the development of HIE efforts. Among all states with laws creating HIE incentives, only states that combined incentives with consent requirements saw a net increase in operational HIEs; HIEs in those states also reported decreased levels of privacy concern relative to HIEs in states with other legislative approaches. Our results contribute to the burgeoning literature on health information technology and the debate on the impact of privacy regulation on technology innovation. In particular, they show that the impact of privacy regulation on the success of information technology efforts is heterogeneous: both positive and negative effects can arise from regulation, depending on the specific attributes of privacy laws.
This paper was accepted by Anandhi Bharadwaj, information systems
.
Empirical Analysis of Data Breach Litigation Romanosky, Sasha; Hoffman, David; Acquisti, Alessandro
Journal of empirical legal studies,
March 2014, Volume:
11, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In recent years, many lawsuits have been filed by individuals seeking legal redress for harms caused by the loss or theft of their personal information. However, very little is known about the ...drivers, mechanics, and outcomes of those lawsuits, making it difficult to assess the effectiveness of litigation at balancing organizations' usage of personal data with individual privacy rights. Using a unique and manually collected database, we analyze court dockets for more than 230 federal data breach lawsuits from 2000 to 2010. We investigate two questions: Which data breaches are being litigated? and Which data breach lawsuits are settling? Our results suggest that the odds of a firm being sued are 3.5 times greater when individuals suffer financial harm, but 6 times lower when the firm provides free credit monitoring. Moreover, defendants settle 30 percent more often when plaintiffs allege financial loss, or when faced with a certified class action suit. By providing the first comprehensive empirical analysis of data breach litigation, our findings offer insight into the debate over privacy litigation versus privacy regulation.
Two sets of studies illustrate the comparative nature of disclosure behavior. The first set investigates how divulgence is affected by signals about others' readiness to divulge and shows a "herding" ...effect: Survey respondents are more willing to divulge sensitive information when told that previous respondents have made sensitive disclosures (Study 1a). The authors provide evidence of the process underlying this effect and rule out alternative explanations by showing that information on others' propensity to disclose affects respondents' discomfort associated with divulgence (Study 1b) but not their interpretation of the questions (Study 1c). The second set of studies investigates how divulgence is affected by the order in which inquiries of varying intrusiveness are made and suggests that divulgence is anchored by the initial questions in a survey. People are particularly likely to divulge when questions are presented in decreasing order of intrusiveness and less likely when questions are presented in increasing order (Study 2a). The authors show that the effect arises by affecting people's judgments of the intrusiveness of the inquiries (Study 2b). The effect is altered when, at the outset of the study, privacy concerns are primed (Study 2c) and when respondents are made to consider the relative intrusiveness of a different set of questions (Study 2d). This research helps illuminate how consumers' propensity to disclose is affected by continual streams of requests for personal information and by the equally unavoidable barrage of personal information about others.
We present the results of a study designed to measure the impact of interruptive advertising on consumers' willingness to pay for products bearing the advertiser's brand. Subjects participating in a ...controlled experiment were exposed to ads that diverted their attention from a computer game they were testing. We measured subjects' willingness to pay for a good associated with the advertised brand. We found that the ads significantly lowered the willingness to pay for goods associated with the advertising brand. We do not find conclusive evidence that providing some level of user control over the appearance of ads mitigates the negative impact of ad interruption. Our results contribute to the research on the economic impact of advertising, and introduce a method of measuring actual (as opposed to self-reported) willingness to pay in experimental marketing research.
► Significant decrease of willingness to pay for a brand that interrupts online flow.
► Reduced willingness to pay attributable to negative reactance.
► More control over iterrupt does not alter the effect.
► Aggressive advertising can raise awareness, but may reduce its bottom line.
This article is part of a Research Dialogue:
Krishna (2020): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1186
Acquisti et al. (2020): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1191
Oyserman & Schwarz (2020): ...https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1189
Mulligan et al. (2020): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1190
Jagadish (2020): https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1188
How does information about a person's past, accessed now, affect individuals' impressions of that person? In 2 survey experiments and 2 experiments with actual incentives, we compare whether, when ...evaluating a person, information about that person's past greedy or immoral behaviors is discounted similarly to information about her past generous or moral behaviors. We find that, no matter how far in the past a person behaved greedily or immorally, information about her negative behaviors is hardly discounted at all. In contrast, information about her past positive behaviors is discounted heavily: recent behaviors are much more influential than behaviors that occurred a long time ago. The lesser discounting of information about immoral and greedy behaviors is not caused by these behaviors being more influential, memorable, extreme, or attention-grabbing; rather, they are perceived as more diagnostic of a person's character than past moral or generous behaviors. The phenomenon of differential discounting of past information has particular relevance in the digital age, where information about people's past is easily retrieved. Our findings have significant implications for theories of impression formation and social information processing.
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