Citation: Homocianu, D. A
Multi-Technique Approach to
Exploring the Main Influences of
Information Exchange Monitoring
Tolerance. Electronics 2022, 11, 528.
https://doi.org/10.3390/
electronics11040528
Academic Editors: Sławomir
Nowaczyk, Rita P. Ribeiro and
Grzegorz Nalepa
Received: 20 December 2021
Accepted: 9 February 2022
Published: 10 February 2022
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral
with regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional affil-
iations.
Copyright: © 2022 by the author.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
Article
A Multi-Technique Approach to Exploring the Main Influences
of Information Exchange Monitoring Tolerance
Daniel Homocianu
Department of Accounting, Business Information Systems, and Statistics, Faculty of Economics and Business
Administration, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, 700505 Iasi, Romania; daniel.homocianu@uaic.ro
Abstract:
The privacy and security of online transactions and information exchange has always been
a critical issue of e-commerce. However, there is a certain level of tolerance (a share of 36%) when it
comes to so-called governments’ rights to monitor electronic mail messages and other information ex-
change as resulting from the answers of respondents from 51 countries in the latest wave
(2017–2020)
of the World Values Survey. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to discover the most significant
influences associated with this type of tolerance and even causal relationships. The variables have
been selected and analyzed in many rounds (Adaptive Boosting, LASSO, mixed-effects modeling,
and different regressions) with the aid of a private cloud. The results confirmed most hypotheses
regarding the overwhelming role of trust, public surveillance acceptance, and some attitudes indi-
cating conscientiousness, altruistic behavior, and gender discrimination acceptance in models with
good-to-excellent classification accuracy. A generated prediction nomogram included 10 ten most re-
silient influences. Another one contained only 5 of these 10 that acted more as determinants resisting
reverse causality checks. In addition, some sociodemographic controls indicated significant variables
afferent to the highest education level attained, settlement size, and marital status. The paper’s
novelty stands on many robust techniques supporting randomly and nonrandomly cross-validated
and fully reproducible results based on a large amount and variety of evidence. The findings also
represent a step forward in research related to privacy and security issues in e-commerce.
Keywords:
tolerance for information exchange monitoring; World Values Survey (WVS); adaptive
boosting; LASSO; Ordinary Least Squares (OLS); binary and ordered logit; mixed-effects modelling;
reverse causality and collinearity checks; prediction nomograms; triangulation, cross-validation, and
full support for replication of results
1. Introduction
The privacy issues and the tolerance level of information exchange monitoring (by
governments) are relevant topics these days, even more so in the context of the latest
advancements. These mainly concern Internet transactions, electronic commerce, and
e-banking. The last two are principal components of e-government (Mishra et al., 2021 [
1
]).
Another part of this context refers to our needs, constantly recreated by the market.
The latter is increasingly profiling and monitoring our lives (Gupta, 1995) [
2
] with the aid
of social media in the race for finding new consumers and standardizing our consumption
(Atzeni, 2019) [
3
]. One of the mighty purposes of e-commerce regulation is to boost
confidence in transactions occurring in such an environment (Alqodsi, 2021) [4].
The importance of the current study is related to its focus on objectively identifying the
influences of public perception regarding the information exchange monitoring tolerance,
insisting on causal relations to isolate the determinants, and eliminating redundancies
(collinearity) after performing many robustness checks in advance. Moreover, full con-
ditions for replicating the results, including the performance metrics, were ensured by
starting from a publicly available large dataset. The latter as a scientific principle also stood
Electronics 2022, 11, 528. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11040528 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics
