Reducing Choice Overload without Reducing Choices

A-Tier
Journal: Review of Economics and Statistics
Year: 2015
Volume: 97
Issue: 4
Pages: 793-802

Score contribution per author:

1.005 = (α=2.01 / 4 authors) × 2.0x A-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

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.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:tpr:restat:v:97:y:2015:i:4:p:793-802
Journal Field
General
Author Count
4
Added to Database
2026-01-24