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Humans are adaptive decision makers: We adjust our choice strategies to
the particularities of the environment we face, whether it is in front
of the wine shelf at our local supermarket or when choosing from mutual
fund prospectuses provided by our employer. The way we choose
fundamentally depends on the setting in which our choices take place.
Therefore, if we want to explain and predict people’s choices we must
analyze the structure of the choice environment and determine how it
interacts with the cognitive mechanisms of individual choosers. In the
specific context of consumer choice, this environment mainly comprises
the assortment of options to choose from, the information available
about these options, and the way in which they are presented. The
articles in this special issue on assortment structure and choice aim to
explore these environmental aspects and how their interaction with
individual decision processes leads to particular choices.
One key characteristic of assortment structure, focused on by the
articles in this special issue, is the size of a given choice set.
Having multiple options to choose from is the default expectation in
modern consumer markets, underlying competition and the ability of
producers to tailor products to different consumer needs and
preferences. Thus, marketers have often taken it for granted that if
some choice is good, more choice will be even better. As a consequence,
in many of today’s consumer markets, the number of options to choose
from is ever-increasing. This idea that more choice is better is backed
up by classic economic choice theory according to which an increase in
the number of attractive options to choose from cannot hurt, because
those consumers who are not interested in the extra choices can simply
ignore them. However, some researchers have recently challenged this
notion, arguing that an overabundance of choice might also lead to
negative consequences such as a decreased motivation to make any choice
or a decreased satisfaction with the finally chosen option. Such
findings have profound implications for marketing and product
development, and so they have received considerable attention among
scientists and practitioners alike.
But while this idea of choice overload was quickly picked up in the
literature, its potential theoretical explanations are still sparse and
the empirical evidence for it is mixed. What is needed is a coherent
framework that explains when and why a change in the number of options
leads to positive or negative consequences for choice. As indicated by
the title of this special issue, such a framework will have to
incorporate both a better understanding of the decision processes
consumers employ, and a better understanding of the assortment structure
as a whole beyond just the number of options--including aspects such as
the amount of information about the options or the similarities between
them.
To approach this goal, the articles in this special issue take different
vantage points to explore characteristics of the structure of product
assortments and how they influence consumer choice: Reutskaja and
Hogarth as well as Haynes explore the relationship between assortment
size and choice satisfaction and show empirically that this relationship
depends on moderating factors like time pressure and cognitive effort.
Fasolo, Carmeci, and Misuraca report evidence that the size of an
assortment and the amount of attribute correlation within it influence
consumers’ subjective time perception and subsequent choice. By
exploring potential moderator variables of choice overload, including
structural aspects of the environment as well as individual differences
between decision makers, Scheibehenne, Greifeneder, and Todd show that
the effect of choice overload is less robust than previously thought.
Fasolo, Hertwig, Huber, and Ludwig provide novel insights into the
structure of real-world grocery assortments and show that these
structural properties exert an important influence on choice difficulty
and quality that has been overlooked so far. Further investigating
consumers’ choice strategies, White and Hoffrage develop and empirically
test a decision model that explains when and why consumers are likely to
defer choice. Finally, in a similar vein, Jessup, Veinott, Todd, and
Busemeyer describe boundary conditions of choice overload based on a
unified theoretical framework called decision field theory, which
predicts choice probabilities depending on the number of options to
choose from and other aspects of the assortment structure.
Taken together, the research presented here offers novel insights and
testable theories regarding how consumers may go about making choices
from the increasingly wide and often complex range of options they
confront. As such, these articles provide further building blocks for
the coherent environment-cognition framework that is needed to
understand this crucial arena of consumer behavior. |
