Consent Notices and the Willingness-to-Sell Observational Data: Evidence from User Reactions in the Field

Privacy regulations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) require e-commerce shops to request opt-in consent for usage data collection from EU website visitors. Despite the regulation’s intentional strengthening of consumer rights, consent notices are often regarded as burdensome by consumers and shops alike. Thus, ever more consumers turn to consent-automating browser extension tools, which decreases opt-in rates for e-commerce shops. To investigate potential for a win-win solution, we examined in cooperation with a fashion retailer in Germany how consumers react when they are presented a coupon for the website’s shop in the moment of cookie consent decision. Using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism, we elicited consumers’ willingnesses-to-sell (WTS) for cookie consent. Our unique field dataset of 1274 participants allows us to derive the WTS of consumers for any desired consent rate. For instance, 65.05% of consumers are ready to trade their consent to cookies for a 10€-coupon value.