The authors examine potential relationships among categories of personal information, beliefs about direct marketing, situational characteristics, specific privacy concerns, and consumers’ direct marketing shopping habits. Furthermore, the authors offer an assessment of the trade-offs consumers are willing to make when they exchange personal information for shopping benefits. The findings indicate that public policy and self-regulatory efforts to alleviate consumer privacy concerns should provide consumers with more control over the initial gathering and subsequent dissemination of personal information. Such efforts must also consider the type of information sought, because consumer concern and willingness to provide marketers with personal data vary dramatically by information type.

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The present study examines the interrelationships among antecedents and consequences of privacy concerns. The results indicate, among other things, that a consumer's attitude toward direct marketing and his/her desire for information control act as antecedents to privacy concerns. Privacy concerns, in turn, are negatively related to purchase behavior and the purchase decision process. Understanding the antecedents of privacy concerns provides a foundation for developing effective policies and practices to reduce such concerns while understanding the consequences of privacy concerns is essential to gauging just how important dealing with these concerns really are for marketers.

The desire to maximize marketing effectiveness and reduce communication costs has increased direct marketers' reliance on computerized databases, customized persuasion, and other consumer information intensive strategies and tactics (28,541. The belief that the success of marketing efforts is positively related to the amount and specificity of individual-level consumer information (7). however, has raised questions about how far companies should be allowed to go in learning about or attempting to persuade consumers (6.40). In the process, privacy has become widely evoked, but often elusive concept. This article develops a framework for addressing privacy concerns that arise when direct marketers utilize consumer information. It does so by identifying the underlying dimensions of the privacy construct and examining the relationships between those dimensions and direct marketers' consumer information practices. This approach not only helps identify situations when privacy matters. but suggests productive strategies and tactics for alleviating consumer concerns related to the use of individual-level consumer information.

Given the explosion of research in the past decade that has examined the Aad‐Ab‐PI relationship using adult subjects, one would expect to see an almost parallel stream of research involving children. However, as is evident in Brown and Stayman's (1992) meta‐analysis of the literature, no studies investigating this area have used children as the sample. This study provides an initial exploration into the Aad‐Ab‐PI relationship in children with specific focus given to the impact of brand familiarity and measurement timing while controlling for prior brand attitudes. Forty‐three third graders and sixty‐eight sixth graders participated in a 2 × 2 factorial experiment that manipulated brand familiarity (familiar vs. unfamiliar) and measurement timing (immediate vs. delayed). Similar to the results using adult subjects, the children's Aad measures significantly affected Ab for both familiar and unfamiliar brands, even after controlling for prior brand attitude. However, contrary to adult responses, the children's Aad had a significant, albeit modest, impact on their PI responses. Based on these results, the paper offers implications for marketers and public policy makers and questions for future research. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.