Preliminary draft prepared for WEIS 2010. Please do not distribute. We introduce and test the hypothesis that control over publication of private information may influence individuals ’ privacy concerns and affect their propensity to disclose sensitive information, even when the objective risks associated with such disclosures do not change or worsen. We designed three experiments in the form of online surveys administered to students at a North-American University. In all experiments we manipulated the participants ’ control over information publication, but not their control over the actual access to and usage by others of the published information. Our findings suggest, paradoxically, that more control over the publication of their private information decreases individuals ’ privacy concerns and increases their willingness to publish sensitive information, even when the probability that strangers will access and use that information stays the same or, in fact, increases. On the other hand, less control over the publication of personal information increases individuals ’ privacy concerns and decreases their willingness to publish sensitive information, even when the probability that strangers will access and use that information actually decreases. Our findings have both behavioral and policy implications, as they highlight how

We study individual decision making in a lottery-choice task performed by three different populations: gamblers under psychological treatment ("addicts"), gamblers ’ spouses ("victims"), and people who are neither gamblers or gamblers’ spouses ("normals"). We find that addicts are willing to take less risk than normals, but the difference is smaller as a gambler’s time under treatment increases. The large majority of victims report themselves unwilling to take any risk at all. However, addicts in the first year of treatment react more than other addicts to the different values of the risk-return parameter.