A Short Paper on the Incentives to Share Private Information for Population Estimates

Consumers are often willing to contribute their personal data for analytics projects that may create new insights into societal problems. However, consumers also have justified privacy concerns about the release of their data. We study the trade-off between privacy concerns related to data release and the incentives to contribute to the estimation of a population average of a private attribute. Consumers may decide whether to participate in the analytics project, and what level of data precision they are willing to provide. We show that setting a minimum precision level for participating users leads to a strict improvement of the estimation.