Investigating online information disclosure: Effects of information relevance, trust and risk

Organizations rely on customer information to design new products and offer new services. However, people should not share their personal information online. We produced and tested a model of information disclosure. While prior work focused on the effects of trust and its relationship to risk in determining intent to disclose information, we assumed that information relevance was a critical antecedent to disclosure and that both relevance and trust could alleviate perceptions of risk associated with disclosure, thereby increasing peoples’ intentions to disclose information. We tested our model using 264 subjects in an experimental setting. The results showed the importance of relevance on intentions to disclose information – allowing us to draw implications for practice about voluntary information disclosure in online settings.