The rapid evolution of digital marketing underscores a critical tension between personalization and privacy, exacerbated by advances in data technologies and artificial intelligence. This study delves into the personalization‐privacy paradox, emphasizing the dichotomy of consumer behavior—desiring customized interactions while guarding personal data. We explore how happiness with the internet (HWI) influences users' willingness to disclose personal information on social media, employing social exchange theory as our conceptual framework. Our research develops and tests a conceptual model that investigates the psychological mechanisms driving information‐sharing behaviors on social media, including the moderating roles of trust beliefs and information collection concerns. By examining the mediating effect of posting frequency on the relationship between HWI and information disclosure for personalization, our findings contribute to understanding the complex interplay between happiness, trust and privacy concerns, coined as transformative privacy calculus. Our study enriches social exchange and privacy calculus theories, providing valuable implications for marketers aiming to navigate the balance between personalization and privacy, suggesting strategies to enhance user engagement without compromising privacy standards.

Purpose: – As the internet has become an increasingly relevant communication and exchange platform, social interactions exist in multiple forms. The research aims to integrate a multitude of those interactions to understand who contributes and why different types of contributors generate and leverage social capital on online review sites. Design/methodology/approach: – Based on the literature about social capital, social exchange theory, and transformative consumer research, the authors carried out a study of 693 contributors on a hotel review site. Content analysis and a latent profile analysis were used to research the contribution types and the underlying motives for generating and leveraging social capital. Findings: – Through the integration of various customer-to-customer interactions, the results reveal a three-class structure of contributors on review sites. These three groups of individuals show distinct patterns in their preferred interaction activities and the underlying motives. Research limitations/implications: – The authors develop the existing literature on transmission of electronic word-of-mouth messages and typologies of contributors. Future research should seek to expand the findings to additional industry and platform contexts and to support the findings through the inclusion of behavioral data. Originality/value: – The research contributes to researchers and marketers in the field by empirically investigating who and why individuals engage in online social interactions. The authors expand upon the existing literature by highlighting the importance of social debt in anonymous online environments and by assessing a three-class structure of online contributors.

Sharing experiences with peers through online reviews has amplified the impacts of individual articulations on the reputations of firms across many industries. With employee review sites, current and former employees share their positive and negative experiences with their company, which has become an increasingly important aspect for reputation management and for job seekers’ decision-making on where to apply. In the present study, the effects of discrepant reviews (i.e., reviews with a high variance in company evaluations) are examined in the context of employer review sites. In particular, we investigate how review discrepancy, persuasion knowledge activation, and constructive company responses affect job seekers’ trust in the company and the resulting application intentions. In our preliminary study, we analyzed a sample of 25,827 published company reviews on the German employee rating site Kununu.de. The results revealed that high levels of discrepant reviews for the same company exist, thus underlining the need for additional studies. In our main study, a 2 (review discrepancy) × 2 (persuasion knowledge activation) × 2 (company response) between-subject-design experiment was conducted with 311 respondents. We find that high levels of discrepancies lead to increased intentions to avoid submitting applications to the focal company and reduced intentions to pursue employment. This study complements the research concerning online reputation by highlighting the relevance of discrepant reviews for job seekers’ application intentions.