What is privacy worth ? Alessandro

We investigate individual privacy valuations in a series of experiments informed by theories from behavioral economics and decision research. We find evidence of order and endowment effects and nonnormal distributions of valuations. In particular, we find that individuals assign markedly different values to the privacy of their data depending on the order in which they consider different offers for that data, or whether they consider the amount of money they would accept to disclose otherwise private information, or the amount of money they would pay to protect otherwise public information. We find the gap between such values to be larger than what usually estimated in comparable studies of other private goods. In addition, we find evidence that privacy valuations are not normally or uniformly distributed, but Ushaped, and clustered around extreme, focal values. These results paint a more nuanced and detailed picture of privacy valuations than the one currently in the literature. They suggest that the value of privacy, while not entirely arbitrary, is highly malleable and sensitive to non-normative factors.