Three Steps Towards the Deeper Insights into Willingness to Disclose Personal Data in Online Shopping: An Abstract

Abstract

Willingness to disclose (WTD) personal information in online shopping is relatively low, though people willingly disclose a lot of information about themselves in social networking. The contradiction between personal data disclosure in the two types of online interactions is a research gap that is hardly explainable within the most used theoretical bases. Another research gap is in balancing up roles of dispositional and situational antecedents of data disclosure. The third research gap is in the role of perceptions about legal regulatory systems on WTD. These gaps required to look for a new theoretical grounding of willingness to disclose personal data. The three research gaps have been addressed on the basis of Social Exchange Theory (SET), which has been rarely considered in marketing studies, and in analysis of personal data disclosure. SET sees interactions (including exchange of personal data for certain benefits) as social exchanges of two types of exchanges (negotiated and reciprocal). Additionally, SET enables to consider perceptions of benefits of exchange, characteristics of exchange participants as well as their relative power, which is important in interactions between individuals and companies/online stores. All the above-mentioned considerations in regards to the applicability of SET for grounding of WTD personal data has been conceptualized and empirically tested in three subsequent studies. The first study aimed to test whether the SET is applicable for the modelling of willingness to disclose personal data in online shopping, considering the possible interaction between the two types of social exchange: reciprocal and negotiated. The study included antecedents of trust-distrust continuum and two mediators: perceived regulatory effectiveness and perceived lack of control. The second study included perceived benefits of data disclosure (experienced earlier and expected), store trust and perception of relative power. The third study concentrated on the most important situational predictor of WTD personal data – store trust – and assessed its antecedents, including the presence of online only versus online and offline channels. The studies confirmed suitability of SET for the modelling of WTD, showed the linkage between reciprocal and negotiated exchange and the importance of the factor of trust in a store.