Individual Privacy and Online Services

We explore consumer trade-offs between better performance through tailoring of online services to their individual needs and greater privacy as a result of reduced disclosure of personal information. We show that individuals have different willingness to accept loss of privacy that is a function of (1) the individual and his/her preferences, because the variation in demands for privacy is not uniform across individuals, (2) the service Domain, because individuals demand more privacy in some Domains than they do in others and (3) these differences themselves differ among consumers as well.