No Strings Attached: When Giving It Away Versus Making Them Pay Reduces Consumer Information Disclosure

• We examine egocentric biases in mental accounting when online consumers are asked to give up personal information in exchange for an incentive.
• Consumers keep balanced mental accounts when the exchanges are contingent or temporary integrated.
• Consumers keep separate mental accounts in contingent exchanges.
• These separate accounts result in an egocentric basis, making consumers less likely to reciprocate by disclosing.

We examine egocentric biases in mental accounting that occur when consumers face the prospect of disclosing personal information in exchange for online marketing incentives. We find that consumers keep balanced “mental accounts” of the costs and benefits of such exchanges when they are contingent or temporally integrated. However, when non-contingent exchanges are temporally separated so that benefits precede costs, or when bias correction is impeded in the same non-contingent transaction, consumers keep separate mental accounts in which they egocentrically devalue the marketers' incentives, making them less likely to reciprocate by disclosing. We explore consequences of these findings for online relationships between consumers and marketers.