Information Privacy, Cultural Values, and Regulatory Preferences

The global nature of e-commerce is complicating privacy issues because perceptions of privacy, trust, risk, and fair information practices vary across cultures, and differences in national regulation create challenges for global information management strategies. Despite the spike in international regulatory attention devoted to privacy issues and the tensions associated with them, there has been very little research on the relationship between information privacy concerns and consumers' regulatory preferences, and even rarer is research that incorporates cultural values into a framework that includes privacy concerns and regulation. This study examines privacy concerns, a full complement of cultural values, trust, risk, and regulation at the individual level in a cohesive manner. Relying on a dataset of consumers gathered in the United States and India, the authors test a model that incorporates these constructs as well as trust and risk beliefs. The model explains 48% of the variance in consumers' regulatory preferences, and all but one of the hypotheses find statistical support.