Online Personalization in the Age of Big Data

This research updates the personalization privacy trade-off for consumers to the era of Big Data, where personalization is becoming more sophisticated and concerns for manipulation and discrimination supplement concerns for privacy. These two concerns have until recently only been described on a theoretical level, but this research operationalizes them for empirical research. It constructed valid scales for the concepts and used those for subsequent hypothesis testing. From a consumer viewpoint, this research assessed the effect of value of personalization and the three concerns on the likelihood of using personalized offerings. It also incorporated a moderating effect of perceived information control. This research once more confirmed the existing trade-off between privacy concerns and value of personalization and also found some evidence that manipulation concerns can lead to less likelihood of using personalized offerings when perceived information control is low. No evidence was found for an effect of concerns for discrimination. Finally, opposite to as was hypothesized, this research found that high perceived control can actually lead to decrease in intent to use personalized offerings when consumers have a high concern for their privacy.