The price is right? Economic value of location sharing

The popularity of location-based services such as Foursquare has made location sharing a common practice. Commercial companies can use the shared location for marketing purposes and often motivate users to share using discounts or special offers. We examine the reward users demand in such a scenario to try and estimate the value they ascribe to their own location information. Our user study is conducted using a mobile phone application that randomly offers users hypothetical money coupons in exchange for publishing their location. Responses by 25 participants to 481 such offers show that the willingness to share increases with coupon value, yet varies greatly with the location being shared. We use logistic regression to estimate the value above which most users will share their location and find it to be €8/€5.4 ($10.4/$7) for a user's home and work respectively. This work contributes to the growing body of knowledge about the economic aspects of location-based services.