CeDEx Seminar - Leonie Gerhards (King's College London)

Keep Them out of It! How Information Externalities Affect the Willingness to Sell Personal Data Online

When individuals share their data, this allows third parties to learn about others, too. Our large-scale online experiment reveals that individuals are less willing to sell personal data when sharing can compromise others' privacy. Compared to a no-compromise benchmark, individuals' willingness to sell data decreases in scenarios in which others' data is compromised with 50% and 100% probability, respectively. By applying two well-studied interventions - peer effects and a social norm focus - we explore ways to mitigate excessive data sharing, laying the ground for the design of effective policies. While peer effects increase individuals' willingness to share personal data on average, making people reflect on the appropriate behaviour is a promising policy.