What drives internet users’ willingness to provide personal information?

Considering that users’ information privacy concerns may affect the development of e-commerce, the purpose of this paper is to explore what drives internet users’ willingness to provide personal information; further, the paper examines how extrinsic rewards moderate the relationship between users’ information privacy concerns and willingness to provide personal information.

Data collected from 345 valid internet users in the context of electronic commerce were analyzed using the partial least squares approach.

The result showed that agreeableness, risk-taking propensity and experience of privacy invasion were three main antecedents of information privacy concerns among the seven individual factors. Additionally, information privacy concerns did not significantly affect users’ willingness to provide personal information in the privacy calculation mechanism; however, extrinsic rewards directly affected users’ disclosure intention. The authors found that extrinsic rewards had not moderated the relationship between users’ information privacy concerns and their willingness to provide personal information.

This study is an exploratory effort to develop and validate a model for explaining why internet users were willing to provide personal information. The results of this study are helpful to researchers in developing theories of information privacy concerns and to practitioners in promoting internet users’ willingness to provide personal information in an e-commerce context.