Privacy violation and diverse choice: How privacy violation shapes subsequent consumers’ variety-seeking behaviors?

Privacy violations have become a frequent and unavoidable part of daily life, yet their impact on subsequent consumer behavior remains underexplored. Drawing on compensatory consumption theory, this research investigates how privacy violations influence consumers’ variety-seeking behaviors. Across five studies, we demonstrate that consumers experiencing a privacy violation exhibit heightened variety-seeking in subsequent product choices. This effect is driven by a diminished sense of control, which prompts consumers to seek variety as a cope way to restore control. However, this tendency diminishes when the sense of control is restored through alternative means or when variety-seeking is unrelated to control restoration. Additionally, this effect is attenuated when consumers are provided with mechanistic explanations, which help them regain a sense of control over their data usage.