Reducing Choice Overload without Reducing Choices

Title: Reducing Choice Overload without Reducing Choices
Format: Journal Article
Publication Date: October 2015
Published In: Review of Economics and Statistics
Description:

Previous studies have demonstrated that a multitude of options can lead to choice overload, reducing  decision  quality.  Through  controlled  experiments,  we  examine  sequential  choice architectures that enable the choice set to remain large while potentially reducing the effect of choice  overload.  A  specific  tournament-style  architecture  achieves  this  goal.  An  alternate architecture in which subjects compare each subset of options to the most preferred option encountered thus far fails to improve performance due to the status quo bias. Subject preferences over different choice architectures are negatively correlated with performance, suggesting that providing choice over architectures might reduce the quality of decisions.

Ivan Allen College Contributors:
External Contributors: Cary Deck, Sudipta Sarangi, and Mikhael Shor
Citation:

Besedes, Tibor, Cary Deck, Sudipta Sarangi, and Mikhael Shor. "Reducing Choice Overload without Reducing Choices," Review of Economics and Statistics (2015), 97(4): 793-802

Categories:
  • Behavioral Economics
  • Experimental Economics
Related Links:
Related Departments:
  • School of Economics