What is Your Information Worth? A Systematic Analysis of the Endowment Effect of Different Data Types

Various smartphone and web applications use personal information to estimate the user's behaviour among others for targeted advertising and improvement of personalized applications. Often applications and web services offer only two choices, either accept their privacy policies or not use the services. Hereby, the general scenario is to pay applications and web services with personal data. As privacy policies are lengthy to read and not comprehensible, most users accept the terms and conditions without the awareness of potential consequences. Thus, most users are unaware of continuously being tracked by many applications installed on their smart devices or accept sharing personal data in exchange for using applications and services online. Therefore, this study attempts to shed some light on the willingness to pay for data protection when offered this option in a continuous data-sharing scenario, and the willingness to accept when offered the option to sell personal data to two different data requestors. The study (N = 500) is conducted via crowdsourcing and examines the monetary valuation of users with respect to different data-sharing scenarios and different data types to allow for a more fine-grained analysis of user preferences. Moreover, different influencing factors such as privacy concerns, awareness and intended behaviour are examined in relation to the user's monetary valuation. The results show significant differences between willingness to pay and accept for ten different data types and the two sharing scenarios contributing to further empirical evidence for the endowment effect. However, the sharing scenarios seem to have not a big influence on willingness to pay but showed significant differences in willingness to accept. Furthermore, the privacy influencing factors seem to negatively correlate with willingness to pay and positively correlate with willingness to accept.