Abstract The increasing use of gamification in the digital service landscape has caught the attention of practitioners and marketers alike. Alarmingly, most of the empirical research has attested to the benefits of such gamified service (e.g. apps) use while neglecting to address potential drawbacks. This research suggests that users of gamified apps end up being more likely to share private information with firms, thus threatening their own personal information privacy. Against this background, the present study links gamification to information disclosure and demonstrates that if a gamified service conveys experiences of, for instance, social comparison, it can indeed lead to greater willingness to disclose personal information. This relationship can be explained by the users’ increased resource depletion through cognitive absorption (i.e. the concentration of one’s entire affective, cognitive, and physical resources on the task at hand). The results further indicate that engaging with gamified apps indeed affects the situational processing of privacy-related decisions (i.e. calculating benefits vs. risks) and the role of dispositional antecedents: In states of deep cognitive absorption, users disclose even more information when they perceive privacy benefits (i.e., situational) and even less when they have high privacy concerns (i.e., dispositional).

中文翻译：

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游戏化的危险：参与游戏化服务是否会增加用户披露个人信息的意愿？

摘要 在数字服务领域越来越多地使用游戏化已经引起了从业者和营销人员的关注。令人担忧的是，大多数实证研究都证明了使用此类游戏化服务（例如应用程序）的好处，而忽略了解决潜在的缺点。这项研究表明，游戏化应用程序的用户最终更有可能与公司共享私人信息，从而威胁到他们自己的个人信息隐私。在此背景下，本研究将游戏化与信息披露联系起来，并表明如果游戏化服务传达了诸如社会比较等经验，它确实可以导致更大的个人信息披露意愿。这种关系可以通过用户通过认知吸收增加的资源消耗来解释（即 将一个人的全部情感、认知和体力资源集中在手头的任务上）。结果进一步表明，使用游戏化应用程序确实会影响隐私相关决策的情境处理（即计算收益与风险）以及倾向性前因的作用：在深度认知吸收的状态下，用户在感知隐私时会披露更多信息利益（即情境），甚至在他们有高度隐私问题（即性格）时更少。