Revealing the black box: Understanding how prior self-disclosure affects privacy concern in the on-demand services

With the growth of on-demand services, consumers are increasingly concerned about information privacy. While the direct relationship between prior self-disclosure and privacy concern has been extensively examined, the mediating mechanism remains as a black box. Revealing this black box can broaden the theoretical understanding of this important relationship, and also provide implications for addressing consumers’ privacy concern. Drawing on prominence interpretation theory and information processing theory, we propose two mediating models. Results suggest that expertise and trustworthiness are key mediators and that a combined model outperforms either one alone in explaining the effect of prior self-disclosure on privacy concern.