Benefit ambiguity and asymmetric herding in privacy decisions: A field experiment in a mobile application system

This study conducts a field experiment to enhance our understanding of the factors affecting permission grants to mobile apps that access personal information or device functionalities. Specifically, we focus on how different levels of information on benefit (benefit ambiguity) and knowing others' permission status affect users' permission granting to mobile apps. Two hundred eighty-three mobile users installed our experimental app, and we observed their change in the permission setting for two weeks. We find that participants who received the detailed reward scheme (low in benefit ambiguity) shared significantly more information items than participants who received the abstract reward scheme (high in benefit ambiguity). We also find the asymmetric herding effect, where participants who shared fewer items than the average were significantly encouraged to share more by obtaining the feedback of others' information sharing status, whereas participants who shared more than the average were not affected by the feedback. Lastly, there was a significant interaction effect between our treatments, such that the asymmetric herding effects were more significant for participants who received the detailed reward scheme. We discuss the implications and future directions of our study.