Purpose: Many online transactions and digital services depend on consumers’ willingness to take privacy risks, such as when shopping online, joining social networks, using online banking or interacting with e-health platforms. Their decisions depend on not only how much they would suffer if...

This paper examines one of the most important marketing strategies by software producers on the Internet. That is whether to offer free samples and, if so, whether to list the samples on shareware repositories. I show that firms with higher value products have a greater incentive to offer free...