THE PERSONALIZATION PRIVACY PARADOX: AN EMPIRICAL

EVALUATION OF INFORMATION TRANSPARENCY AND THE

WILLINGNESS TO BE PROFILED ONLINE FOR PERSONALIZATION
Awad & Krishnan, 2006
The main purpose of this paper is to empirically examine a paradox for firms
investing in personalization of consumers. That is, the consumers who value
information transparency are less willing to be profiled online.
The authors first provide a comprehensive review of the prior research and
thereby highlight and clarify the specific contributions of their study (i.e.
online context, examining importance of information transparency features
as a new construct, contrasting advertising and service to assess the
effect of outcome utility on the willingness to share information, and
considering consumer experiences and their effect on the willingness to be
profiled online.).
The next section deals with the theory and hypotheses. The utility
maximization theory is used as the underlying theory for this study. After a
discussion about the weaknesses of this theory and the way previous
research has responded those weaknesses, the authors explain that in the
consumers utility function they have considered for this study the Benefit
is derived through the degree of personalization received by consumer and
the Cost is a function of consumer privacy concerns, previous privacy
invasion

experience,

and

consumer-rated

importance

of

information

transparency and privacy policies.

The hypotheses are tested using a web survey and the results suggest that
as hypothesized, consumers who value information transparency are less
willing to partake in personalized offerings. It suggests firms to concentrate
their efforts on consumers who are more willing to partake in online
personalization from beginning. Also it is shown that consumers perceive

different value levels in different outcomes (i.e. service vs. advertising) and
this perception consequently affects their utility perception. It suggests that
offering more interesting benefits to the customers can cancel out the effect
of previous privacy issues and provide more willingness in the consumers to
be profiled online.
One thing that annoyed me about this study was the organization of
manuscript. That is, the definition of variables is provided after the
elaboration

of

hypotheses.

However

the

method

discriminant validity was new and interesting to me.

used

for

checking

Internet Users Information Privacy Concerns (IUIPC): The

Construct, the Scale, and a Causal Model
Malhorta et al. 2004

The main purpose of this article is to offer a theoretical framework on the

dimensionality of internet users information privacy concerns, develop a
second-order scale for capturing these concerns, and finally to test this
construct and its scale using a causal model which tries to identify its effect
on the behavioral intention of internet users towards releasing their personal
information at the request of a marketer.
First, the authors argue that a consumers concern about information privacy
can be fully understood when know how individuals define justice in the longterm exchange of personal information; and that Social Contracts (SC) theory
is useful for studying the perceptions of fairness. So drawing on SC theory,
they identify three factors (i.e. collection, control, and awareness) and
characterize IUIPC in terms of them.
A causal model is proposed on the basis of the trust-risk model (by
incorporating trust beliefs and risk beliefs in the model) as well as the theory
of reasoned action. Also the study is manipulated in terms of the sensitivity
of information requested from users (sensitive vs. non-sensitive information)
as the consumers reactions to different types of questions depends on the
sensitivity of information requested.

Two empirical studies are conducted; the first one to develop measures for
control and awareness as two dimensions of IUIPC that didnt have
previously established measures. And the second one to test the proposed
causal model. The results provide supports for all the hypothesized
relationships.
To me, the most important contribution of this study was to incorporate
control and awareness in the conceptualization and operationalization of a
measure which captures online privacy concerns in addition to collection
which was the only dimension in previous similar constructs.

An Extended Privacy Calculus Model for

E-Commerce Transactions
Dinev and Hart, 2006

The main goal of this article is to address a paradox. That is, while privacy
concerns are reported to be a major factor inhibiting e-commerce, sales over
the internet continue to increase. The rationale used to address this paradox
is based on this fact that individuals are willing to overlook a part of their
privacy concerns in exchange of gaining a benefit which encompasses a
reasonable risk of disclosure of private information.
In line with TRA and TPB theories, the authors propose a model with two
main components (beliefs and behavioral intentions). In this model it is
assumed that two contrary salient beliefs (i.e. risk beliefs and confidence and
enticement beliefs) influence individuals intention to disclose the personal
information on the internet. This decision making process is called the
privacy calculus by the authors.
After explaining hypotheses of relationships between risk, confidence (trust),
and enticement (personal interest) belief with intention to disclose
information, using scales adopted from literature as well as developed by

the authors, a cross-sectional survey has been conducted to test the

proposed model.
The results indicate support for all the hypothesized relationships in the
proposed model as an extended model of privacy calculus.
The question that came to me after reading this paper was the different
approaches between the model proposed in this study with the model
proposed in Malhotra et al. study in terms of the causality direction between
Privacy Concerns and Perceived Risk. In this study Privacy Concerns are
theorized to be an antecedent of Perceived Risk, and the direction of this
relationship is vice versa in the other study. So the question is which one
makes more sense?

U NDERSTANDING AND M ITIGATING U NCERTAINTY IN O NLINE

E XCHANGE R ELATIONSHIPS : A P RINCIPAL A GENT
P ERSPECTIVE
Pavlou et al., 2007

The main purpose of this article is to identify the main antecedents of

consumers uncertainty in online environment and consequently to propose
mitigating factors to reduce its harmful role in e-commerce.
The authors first argue that principal-agent perspective (on the basis of
agency theory), as previously applied to buyer-seller relationships, can also
be applied to such relationship in online environments. Based on this
perspective they argue that the four factors that spawn uncertainty
perceptions in online exchange relationships (that can lead to two
information problems: hidden information and hidden action) involve
perceived information asymmetry, fears of seller opportunism, information

privacy, and information security. They continue that four factors can
contribute to the mitigation of the perceived uncertainty, namely trust,
website informativeness, product diagnosticity, and social presence.
The other important hypothesized relationship is the moderating role of
purchase involvement on the relationship between perceived uncertainty
and purchase intention. That is, higher the purchase involvement, greater
the effect of uncertainty on purchase intention. In order to test for this
hypothesis, two contexts have been examined; online book purchasing as a
low involvement context and online drug purchasing as a high involvement
purchase. Also to test generalizability of the proposed model online book
purchasing has only focused on a single website and online prescription
filling has focused on a group of websites, not a single specific one.
For each of the contexts a separate longitudinal survey has been conducted
using the same instruments and the PLS method has been used to analyze
the data. The results have provided support for most but not all of the
hypotheses.
In spite of valuable contributions of this study, I would criticize the contexts
selected as low and high involvement due to the effect they may have on the
results. It is very likely that someone has a real intention to provide her
prescribed drugs from a specific website whenever she becomes sick, but
during the period of study she does not get sick and so make no purchases
from that website. So in this case the purchase intention will not lead to real
purchase only due to the lack of consumers urge to purchase. It is also the
case for books. So it seems that it is necessary either to capture the urge of
consumers or to change the contexts to some more routine goods/services.

PRIVACY IN THE DIGITAL AGE: A REVIEW OF

INFORMATION PRIVACY RESEARCH IN INFORMATION
SYSTEMS
Belanger and Crossler, 2011

This article mainly focuses on the status of Information Privacy construct

within the IS research and conducts a comprehensive review on the literature
to evaluate theoretical contributions made by information privacy literature

(theory classification) as well as to classify the literature based on the levels

of analysis.
The paper is organized in four main sections, each of which discussing one of
the main findings of this review study.
The first section discusses the wide variety of topics identified by the authors
as the relevant topics to the information privacy concept. The authors argue
that information privacy is studied through several different topics in IS
research. Amongst, they discuss five of the mostly appeared topics (i.e.
information privacy concerns, e-business, impacts of information privacy,
attitudes, and practices) and explore the key findings in each topic.
The second main section deals with different theoretical contributions of
information privacy research. In this section they analyze and categorize the
papers in terms of their theory type in five classes (i.e. analyzing, explaining,
predicting, explaining and predicting, and design and action). They argue
that a high percentage of information privacy research contribute to
explaining and predicting, while design and action research is considerably
neglected.
The third section discusses the characteristics of samples used in information
privacy studies in terms of the respondent type and origin. It is argued that
most of the studies have used student samples and most of the respondents
are from the United States and these issues can considerably question the
generalizability of information privacy studies.
Finally the studies are discussed in terms of levels of analysis (i.e. individual,
group, organizational, and societal). It is shown that information privacy has
multiple levels of analysis, but it is rarely considered as a multilevel concept
in IS research.
Based on these findings, the authors propose a multilevel framework for
information privacy research and a number of potential research question
are discussed within that framework.