Essays on privacy perceptions and privacy behaviors of online shoppers

Abstract

Scope and Method of Study: Information privacy in e-commerce is tied to concrete situations of information exchange. Current studies on information privacy in e-commerce primarily focus on the impact of privacy concern as a general personal trait, ignoring the potential influence of various situational factors such as emotions, Web site design, and information requested, among others. This dissertation investigates the impacts of such situation-specific factors on online shoppers' privacy perceptions and privacy behaviors when they are interacting with unfamiliar Web sites. These impacts are viewed through two different lenses; an affect-based lens and a cognition-based lens.

Findings and Conclusions: The results of this dissertation suggest that situational factors are more important than general privacy concern in shaping salient privacy beliefs and privacy decisions when consumers are immersed in interactions with Web sites. Specifically, we found that initial emotions formed based on overall Web site impression have a lasting coloring effect on later stage cognitive processing of information exchange. During information exchange, online shoppers conduct a cost-benefit tradeoff analysis. The information disclosure is found to be the result of competing influences of exchange benefits and two types of privacy beliefs (privacy protection belief and privacy risk belief). The attractiveness of the products or services, together with high privacy protection belief could override the influence of privacy risks and result in high behavioral intention to disclose personal information. Additionally, the cost-benefit tradeoff analysis is further adjusted by the exchange fairness. Fairness-based levers (relevance of information collected and privacy policy) could enhance privacy protection belief and reduce privacy risk belief. The effect of monetary awards is also dependent upon the exchange fairness (relevance of information collected), which could undermine information disclosure when information collected has low relevance to the purpose of the transaction. Future studies on information privacy may need to consider these situation-specific factors. Social contract theory provides a useful theoretical foundation to study information disclosure in the conventional e-commerce marketplace.