Pay for Privacy

My qualifier research examined whether making privacy information more prominent would sway people to purchase from websites that do a better job of protecting their privacy. We found that making this information available at the search engine interface did indeed lead our participants to pay a premium for privacy. The paper is available here (pdf). I'll be presenting this research at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS).

Subsequently, Carnegie Mellon issued a press release about my research available here.

Then, it was picked up on Slashdot, and also the BBC. So exciting!