How Much to Share with Third Parties? Users’ Privacy Concerns and Website’s Dilemma

《MIS Quartely》         作者：Ram D. Gopal, Hooman Hidaji, Raymond A. Patterson,Erik Rolland, and Dmitry Zhdanov

内容摘要：Websites are increasingly presenting content and services that are not created and managed by the publisher’s websiteadministrators themselves, but are provided by other third-parties. While third-party content and services provide valueand utility to the site visitors, this comes at the cost of visitor information being shared with the third-parties. Thus,information is shared not just with the publisher website, but also with the third-parties that the publisher has employed.Privacy concerns surrounding information leakage have been growing rapidly. With growing concerns regarding onlineprivacy and information disclosure, it is important to understand the factors that affect the level of sharing behaviorbetween website publishers and third-parties. In this study, we propose a two-sided economic model that captures theinteraction between the users, publisher websites, and third-parties. Specifically, we focus on the effect of privacyconcerns on the sharing behavior of the website, and the impact of users’ privacy concerns on the third-party industryconcentration. We also analyze welfare aspects to provide insights on the impacts of industry regulations and policy.We validate the model using an exploratory empirical analysis of sharing with third-parties and industry structure amongthese players.

关键词：Economics of information systems, privacy, third-parties, information sharing, social welfare