Unraveling User Perceptions of Interorganizational Information Sharing

Collecting large amounts of user information is becoming an increasingly important source of value for businesses. Such data sets may be expanded through engaging in value co-creation with other organizations. Sharing user information across organizations, however, might evoke users’ privacy concerns. Existing mechanisms and concepts developed in prior information privacy research on sharing information between one user and one organization may no longer apply as multiple organizations become involved. This creates the necessity to understand more granularly how users perceive privacy situations that involve sharing their information across organizations – and how their concerns may be alleviated through control mechanisms. Employing the lens of Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory, we conceptualize this phenomenon as Interorganizational Information Sharing (IIS) and theorize on perceived uncertainty and control to unravel user perceptions in IIS. We present our ideas for a research model, as well as our planned methodology for empirical validation.