Abstract
The purpose of this article is to empirically examine affective reactions of consumers to inter-firm sharing of their use-context data in value co-creation (VCC) settings. Reviewing literatures on VCC based marketing and discussing ethical dimensions of inter-firm data sharing in VCC, empirical data were analyzed to compare degrees of consumer-perceived discomfort in the three data use situations (i.e. internal utilization, inter-firm data sharing for VCC and transfer to third parties outside the VCC). The results indicated that, for reducing the discomfort level of consumers, firms should clarify consumers’ merits of inter-firm sharing of consumer data and communicate them to the consumers.
