Understanding Online Information Disclosure As a Privacy Calculus Adjusted by Exchange Fairness

Current studies on information privacy fail to explain widely observed contradictions between online consumers’ privacy concern (treated as a general personality trait) and online information disclosure. These contradictions occur because situation-specific factors are not taken into account. This paper contributes to the literature on information privacy by theorizing and empirically testing how information disclosure is driven by competing situation-specific benefits and risk factors. The results of this study indicate that, in the context of an e-commerce transaction with an unfamiliar vendor, information disclosure is the result of competing influences of exchange benefits and two types of privacy beliefs (privacy protection belief and privacy risk belief). In addition, the effect of monetary rewards is dependent upon the fairness of information exchange. Monetary rewards could undermine information disclosure when information collected has low relevance to the purpose of the e-commerce transaction.