Abstract
Despite the clear benefits of preventive health technologies, adoption rates remain persistently low. While existing literature attributes this adoption gap to financial constraints or behavioral biases (e.g., inattention, present bias), this study investigates a critical but under-explored barrier: the psychological cost of privacy disclosure in the health context. We conduct a randomized controlled trial involving a Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) screening tool to causally estimate the privacy wedge, the reduction in product valuation driven by the requirement to share sensitive personal data (home address).
Methodologically, we exploit a novel design that randomizes the timing of information collection: one group provides sensitive address data before stating their Willingness-to-Pay (WTP), while a clean benchmark group provides it after valuation. This design allows us to back out the monetary value of privacy friction as the difference in WTP between the two arms. Furthermore, we interact this privacy variation with behavioral nudges (e.g., risk salience, benefit framing) to test whether high-stakes health information alters individuals’ privacy valuation. Our study aims to contribute two key insights: (1) providing a structural estimate of the privacy cost in health markets , and (2) demonstrating how information environments can modulate privacy preferences, offering policy implications for the design of digital health interventions.