Understanding Users’ Willingness to Pay for Privacy in Mobile Applications: An Integration of Protection Motivation and Privacy Calculus

Recently, a new pattern of privacy protection, namely, paid privacy-enhancing services, has been regarded as a potential solution to current privacy issues. However, existing research on this new pattern is insufficient because of inconsistent findings on users’ willingness to pay (WTP) and the ambiguous underlying mechanism. Accordingly, integrating the theoretical lenses of protection motivation and privacy calculus and considering privacy literacy, this study proposes a framework to explain users’ behaviors towards paid privacy-enhancing services. Through online questionnaire surveys conducted in the contexts of apps with different levels of privacy sensitivity, the proposed framework is demonstrated to have great explanation and generalizability for users’ WTP. Our study offers insight into prior inconsistent findings and enriches the literature regarding privacy protection, consumers’ privacy behaviors, and privacy literacy. Our findings also demonstrate a potential way to balance consumers’ privacy concerns and companies’ various privacy appeals, providing significant implications for consumers, firms, and policymakers.