Data Privacy in Retail: Navigating Tensions and Directing Future Research

Abstract To understand data privacy in retailing, one must consider a myriad of consumer, retailer, and regulatory tensions, trade-offs, and compromises. Scholarly research on consumer data privacy in retailing remains a fruitful area of inquiry precisely because it confronts these critical tensions. As a scholarly domain, data privacy research investigates questions and contexts that are fraught with persistent conflicts and paradoxes. Despite some important advances, many pressing questions remain, leaving various tensions unresolved too. In this editorial, we review the role of data privacy in retailing, attending to focal consumer and retailer tensions. We also provide an overview of the unique contributions offered by the articles in this issue, stressing the novel insights they provide for retail theory and practice. This overview exposes three promising research directions that offer particular promise for informing the critical data privacy tensions that we identify and for expanding the relevance of data privacy research to encompass a broader set of retail implications. These research directions in turn may motivate future scholarly inquiry in retailing, inform retail management, and suggest public policy options.