Handbook of Media Economics, vol 1B

that relative standards and herding behavior also affected disclosure propensity. Such

findings highlight in real data how fungible consumer valuations of privacy are.

This fungibility has led to something called the “privacy paradox.” The privacy par-

adox emphasizes that though individuals state in surveys that they care about their online

privacy (essentially, considering it to be a “final good” with value in and of itself ), con-

sumers’ economic behavior generally treats privacy as an intermediate good.

Miltgen and

Tucker (2014)

provide some evidence from a field experiment conducted in France

which helps illuminate why this occurs. They show that when money is not involved,

people tend to behave in a privacy-protective way which is consistent ...