Research Commentary—Informing Privacy Research Through Information Systems, Psychology, and Behavioral Economics: Thinking Outside the “APCO” Box

Abstract

Recently, several researchers provided overarching macromodels to explain individuals’ privacy-related decision making. These macromodels—and almost all of the published privacy-related information systems (IS) studies to date—rely on a covert assumption: responses to external stimuli result in deliberate analyses, which lead to fully informed privacy-related attitudes and behaviors. The most expansive of these macromodels, labeled “Antecedents–Privacy Concerns–Outcomes” (APCO), reflects this assumption. However, an emerging stream of IS research demonstrates the importance of considering principles from behavioral economics (such as biases and bounded rationality) and psychology (such as the elaboration likelihood model) that also affect privacy decisions. We propose an enhanced APCO model and a set of related propositions that consider both deliberative (high-effort) cognitive responses (the only responses considered in the original APCO model) and low-effort cognitive responses inspired by frameworks and theories in behavioral economics and psychology. These propositions offer explanations of many behaviors that complement those offered by extant IS privacy macromodels and the information privacy literature stream. We discuss the implications for research that follow from this expansion of the existing macromodels.