Dynamic Effect of Determinants of Information Disclosure in Ecommerce: A Longitudinal and Ambivalent Approach

To be competitive in the market, businesses increasingly attempt to collect a mess of personal data to get better insight on their customers and their purchase patterns. Thus, it is critical for businesses to discover important factors that determine customers information disclosure. Previous research accordingly has been motivated to identify key determinants of information disclosure such as benefits or risks and examine their effect in different contexts. However, the cognitive assessment of benefits and costs associated with information disclosure is affected by not only the appraisal of benefits and risk in a specific setting, but also the appraisal of gap between expected and perceived benefits and risk. People tend to put more focus on the variation of their perceived benefits or risks from their expectation than their perceived benefits or risks themselves to determine their behavior. In this light, it deserves to receive more attention to examine the effect of the gap between their expected and perceived key determinants of information disclosure through longitudinal study. Furthermore, previous studies have reported inconsistent effect of determinants of information disclosure, which suggests the necessity of examining the mediators or moderators for explaining the variation of the effect. To close the gaps, this study attempts to examine the effect of the gap between the expected and perceived key determinants of information disclosure by conducting a longitudinal experimental survey consist of two phases. In the first phase, we will provide participants with a general information about personal information collection and examine the effect of key determinants on information disclosure. In the second phase, we will assign participants into different groups in terms of the gap: confirmed vs. disconfirmed. While confirmed condition indicates that situational cues support their expected benefits and risks of information disclosure, disconfirmed condition denotes that situational cues disapprove the expected benefits and risks of the determinants. Then the effect of the benefits and risks on information disclosure will be statistically analyzed for each group. Moreover, we will examine the effect of attitudinal ambivalence on the relationship between the key determinants and information disclosure in order to explain the reported unstable effect of the key determinants. Attitudinal ambivalence refers to degree to which people hold opposite beliefs at the same time toward a focal object. The ambivalence is hypothesized to weaken the the effect of privacy attitude on disclosure behavior.