Introduction: Data breaches are a relatively new phenomenon and are continuously becoming more frequent and widespread. The first breach was reported recently in 2005 (lifelock.com 2019), and soon that number climbed exponentially from 157 in 2005 to 1579 in 2017 alone (statista.com 2019) and is growing ever since. According to IBM Security data breaches cost a US business on average $7.91 million. There is little guidance available to companies on how to best respond in the aftermath of a data breach scenarios (Bansal 2019). Similarly, there is little guidance on how the trust is violated and how it could be restored in such situations.
Research Question: In this research we are examining the following two research questions: (a) Do companies that are recognized for their environmental stewardship have a strategic advantage in restoring trust after a data breach?; (b) Is the trust restoration following a data breach moderated by perceived underlying motives of an organization’s environmental efforts.
Experiment Design: The study will be examined using four scenarios – (a) environmental stewardship (other-centered group), (b) economic profit motive (self-centered group), (c) ethical stewardship, (d) and control group. We are using Qualtrics for data collection. The respondents are being recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk from all over the US. We have obtained the IRB approval for this project. We are currently in the process of collecting data for this project. The data will be analyzed by the end of March 2019.
