What Is Privacy Worth?
Acquisti first author. A shopping-mall field experiment with real money and 349 women, mean age 35, offered a 10 dollar anonymous gift card against a 12 dollar identified one, across five conditions. 52.1 per cent kept the anonymous card when endowed with it, while only 9.7 per cent paid 2 dollars for it when endowed with the identified card. In the authors' words, subjects were five times more likely to choose privacy in one condition than the other, facing the same choice.
Acquisti first author. A shopping-mall field experiment with real money and 349 women, mean age 35, offered a 10 dollar anonymous gift card against a 12 dollar identified one, across five conditions. 52.1 per cent kept the anonymous card when endowed with it, while only 9.7 per cent paid 2 dollars for it when endowed with the identified card. In the authors' words, subjects were five times more likely to choose privacy in one condition than the other, facing the same choice.
Written from the full text read 2026-10-18.
What our sources record
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Acquisti, A., John, L. K., & Loewenstein, G. (2013). 'What Is Privacy Worth?' The Journal of Legal Studies, 42(2), 249-274. doi:10.1086/671754.