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PRIVATE HEALTH DATA DISCLOSURE – A REPEATED SCENARIO DESIGN TO INVESTIGATE THE WILLINGNESS TO PROVIDE DATA ACCESS TO INSURANCE COMPANIES
While companies in the field of e-commerce have long engaged in the collection of large amounts of customer data and consider them one of their most important assets, insurance companies have only recently started to collect customer data on a large scale (Smith, Dinev & Xu, 2011). Recently, insurance companies have developed tariffs which adjust premiums based on collected data about the insurant’s behavior (e.g. steps/day, visits to the gym etc.). Benefits like fitness courses or lower insurance rates are provided to encourage a healthy lifestyle and attract healthy customers. However, this model can only succeed, if customers are willing to disclose data. As many customers fear an intrusion of their privacy by companies and consider personal health data to be especially sensitive, this disclosure cannot be taken for granted (Anderson & Agarwal, 2011). The paper evaluates two main influencing factors for the willingness to disclose private health data (benefit offered to customers and sensitivity of data requested). It analyzes their effect by conducting an online scenario-based quasiexperiment with 408 participants. Participants are presented with six hypothetical offers by a health insurance (financial and non-financial benefits; low, medium, high data sensitivity) and indicate how they would respond to these offers in terms of data disclosure. We control for individual heterogeneity by including privacy concerns and trust as between-subject factors (Malhotra, Kim, & Agarwal, 2004). Our results indicate that the willingness to disclose health data can be increased by financial rewards at low and medium sensitivity levels. If information is highly sensitive, the willingness to provide data decreases and cannot be compensated by a tariff reduction. Health care providers should therefore carefully consider which data points they choose as mandatory to participate in personalized insurance tariffs, as they could easily scare off potential customers. In our study non-financial benefits (prevention courses) are not able to increase the willingness to disclose data as much as financial benefits. This could be due to a general preference for financial rewards or to the unknown quality of the courses offered.
