Who’s in to Win?: Participation Rate in a Primary Personal Information Market

Abstract: Understanding individuals’ willingness to share their personal data with companies is an important theme in social media research. Yet there is a dearth of research into the issue of granting access to social media data in exchange for financial compensation. Currently there is no readily available means by which individuals can reap a financial benefit by selling their personally generated data. One solution which could address this is a permissions-based Primary Personal Information Market (PPIM). This paper investigates the willingness of digital citizens to grant access to their social media data in exchange for financial compensation. We simulated requests to access personal information and found that the 90% confidence interval for the proportion of digital citizens who accepted one or more request was [79.8%, 91.3%] with a sample estimate of 86.5%. We found significant factors in this decision were, age, ethnic background, price offered, contact channel, use and company type.