Privacy Calculus on Customer Self-disclosure Behavior: Social Influence as a Moderator

Abstract

Self-disclosure is a way to help e-retailers receive customer information that contributes to building good relationships This study tries to provide a better understanding on the effect of customer willingness on self-disclosure The objective of this study is to investigate the role of e-retailers and the customers themselves with regard to their willingness toward self-disclosure To achieve this goal this study adopts privacy calculus theory to explain the process of forming customer willingness However privacy calculus theory only considers one’s own perception; therefore social influence is integrated into privacy calculus theory to examine the moderating effect of surrounding people 405 valid questionnaires were collected from the Internet Data consists of respondents who have both independent online shopping experience and online privacy invasion experience The data results demonstrate that an e-retailer’s responsiveness and compensation provisions can increase perceived benefits and reduce customer privacy concerns It was also found that previous privacy experience plays an important role in the perception of risk In addition perceived benefits can increase perceived value which further increases self-disclosure willingness but perceived risk shows the contrary result with regard to increasing willingness Furthermore the moderating effect of normative social influence and informational social influence on belief were proven Based on the findings e-retailers should respond to customers rapidly and offer compensations to encourage information sharing; in addition e-retailers should create a good store image and put understandable privacy protection remarks on their websites to make customers trust them

Date of Award	2014 Jul 21
Original language	English
Supervisor	Hsin-Hsin Chang (Supervisor)