Keep them out of It! How information externalities affect the willingness to sell personal data online
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6435002 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tim Friehe (0000-0002-9390-3537), Leonie Gerhards (0000-0001-7885-1874), Franziska Weber |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 109 |
| Pages | 102830-102830 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-31 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Economic Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0167-4870 • E-ISSN: 1872-7719 |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.joep.2025.102830 |
| OpenAlex | W4412791272 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 53 |
When individuals provide their personal data online, they often disregard that this allows learning about others, too. Our large-scale online experiment reveals that individuals are less willing to provide personal data when sharing can compromise others’ privacy, entailing personalized price discrimination. Compared to a benchmark without data compromise, individuals’ willingness to sell data decreases when others’ data is compromised with 50% or 100% probability. By applying two well-studied interventions – peer effects and a social norm focus – we explore ways to mitigate excessive data sharing, laying the ground for policy design. While peer effects, on average, increase individuals’ willingness to provide personal data, making people reflect on the appropriate behavior appears to be a promising social nudge to reduce negative externalities
Affect (linguistics · Business · Economics · Externality · Microeconomics · Communication · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection · Psychology · Social Psychology · Survey Methodology and Nonresponse · Technology Adoption and User Behaviour · Marketing
Norms Make Preferences Social
oTree—An open-source platform for laboratory, online, and field experiments
Managing social norms for persuasive impact
Group Identity and Social Preferences
Managing diversity by creating team identity
Measuring utility by a single-response sequential method
Privacy and human behavior in the age of information
Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability?
The Willingness to Pay–Willingness to Accept Gap, the “Endowment Effect,” Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations
Identifying Social Norms Using Coordination Games: Why Does Dictator Game Sharing Vary?
Privacy self-management and the issue of privacy externalities
The Economics of Privacy
Privacy, Personalization, and Price Discrimination
Gaydar
Social influence on third-party punishment
The focusing and informational effects of norms on pro-social behavior
Contagion of pro- and anti-social behavior among peers and the role of social proximity
Peer effects and social preferences in voluntary cooperation
Taking shortcuts
The effect of perceived similarity and social proximity on the formation of prosocial preferences
Using descriptive social norms to increase charitable giving
The Structure and Behavioral Effects of Revealed Social Identity Preferences
A focus theory of normative conduct
Strangers on a Plane
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |