Abstract
Personal information is a precious resource, not only for commercial interests but also for the public benefit. Reporting personal location data, for example, may aid efficient traffic flows and sharing one's health status may be a crucial instrument of disease management. We experimentally study individuals' willingness to contribute personal information to information-based public goods. Our data provide evidence that-compared to monetary contributions to public goods-information may be substantially under-provided. We show that the degree of information provision is strongly correlated to the information's implicit (emotional and cognitive) costs. Individual's reluctance to share personal information with high implicit, in particular emotional costs, may seriously limit the effectiveness of information-based public goods.
Highlights
The creation of public benefits frequently depends on individuals’ willingness to provide personal information
Our study demonstrates that structural distortions in the level of information public goods should be expected, depending on the implicit cost of information provision that the underlying information requests incur for the contributors
We find that (3) subjects engage in selective information provision, i.e., items with a low implicit provision cost are more likely provided than items with a high implicit provision cost
Summary
The creation of public benefits frequently depends on individuals’ willingness to provide personal information. The effectiveness of public disease control, for example, crucially depends on individuals’ willingness to report a suspected illness to a health authority. Advances in data collection and data mining enable far-reaching analyses and tremendously improved possibilities for inference. Their success in creating a public good on the basis of the collected individual information crucially relies on individuals’ willingness to provide personal information. It has been shown that people hold idiosyncratic preferences for privacy, and that these preferences strongly depend on the context and the type of personal information [1,2]. The topic’s relevance amplifies with the rapid technological advancements, to the best of our knowledge no study
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