Location disclosure on LB-SNAs: The role of incentives on sharing behavior

•We investigate the role of incentives in location disclosure behavior on LB-SNA.•Opinion leadership is offered as a new construct in the IS literature.•Opinion leadership, social norm, risk, and benefit predict attitude toward LB-SNA.

Location based social network applications (LB-SNAs) allow business access to real-time customer location information. Despite concerns about individual privacy, the popularity of LB-SNAs is rising. This research considers how marketers can motivate people to disclose their location even when they are aware of the risks involved. The data from these applications encourages customers to try new businesses and allows those businesses to provide services that increase loyalty among current customers. The proposed LB-SNA model was tested using survey research with active online LB-SNA users. Findings show that privacy concerns do not moderate the correlation between attitude and location disclosure and that the decision to disclose location information is correlated with incentives. We also show that opinion leadership is a new antecedent for understanding attitudes about location disclosure. This study fills a research gap by positing and testing how an external factor such as incentives can alter a person's attitude about sharing private information. We also refine correlated factors to attitudes, discovering that if a person perceives that they are an opinion leader, they will also be more inclined to have a positive attitude about LB-SNA. In conjunction to testing these new motives this research is the first to modify Internet privacy concerns to fit LB-SNAs specifically, test a model that is contextualized to LB-SNAs, and include incentives and opinion leadership as dimensions within a privacy model. These findings are relevant to practitioners interested in motivating user participation, as well as academics searching for better understanding of privacy behaviors.