I have not had time to read the original study but this rings true to me:
But now Benjamin Scheibehenne and colleagues have waded into the topic with the claim that the "too-much-choice effect" has in fact failed to appear in many experiments, and with the real-life observation that shops that offer more consumer choice tend to be more successful.
In a series of experiments, Scheibehenne's team tested 598 participants who were asked to choose from among restaurants, charities and music downloads. Throughout, they varied factors that they hoped might explain why the too-much-choice effect sometimes occurs and sometimes doesn't.
Examples of these factors included the need to justify one's choice; the perceived variety of choice, as opposed to actual amount of choice; the mean attractiveness of a range of choices; cultural differences (they tested German and US students); and individual differences such as people's tendency to maximise – that is, their consistent desire to find the perfect option.
For most of the experiments, the too-much-choice effect wasn't actually observed and when it did, the only relevant factor which increased the effect was the need to justify one's choice.
"The fact that most of the variables that we tested were not sufficient to elicit choice overload suggests that the too-much-choice effect is less robust than previously thought," the researchers said.
Repeat this fragment after me: "…the real-life observation that shops that offer more consumer choice tend to be more successful."
Why do I choose that you should repeat that fragment and not some other? I'm not going to tell you.
That’s OK. I am more comfortable repeating what you tell me anyway.
Sweet.
Has someone tested the “real life” observation?
It could very well be a case of reverse causality. It’s not that shops that offer more choice become more successful, but shops that are successful have the resources to be able to offer more choice.
Ya, that’s funny. In my Second Life observation, Walmart’s not doing too hot.
There are reasons other than regret / the need for justification to think that more choices can be bad (although I agree it would be insane to think that more choice is always bad). In many cases, there are objective criteria we can use to evaluate choices to determine whether individuals make mistakes – if mistakes are prevalent, more choices might mean increased scope for mistakes. My personal favorite paper on this topic is:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14759
Corollary: people who don’t care about logical coherence and justification should find it easier to make choices.
“Choice” does not equal “informed selection.” If there are a number of similar-yet-not-identical competing choices, and it takes significant effort to distinguish between them, one can certainly become irritated trying to locate all relevant information and then making a cognitive judgement on which product to select. The more choices, the more effort involved; ergo, the idea that more choice is a negative.
If you don’t care about making an informed decision, the product selection process is much easier, and the number of choices far less relevant.
An excellent “lack of choice” example to back up the fragment you’ve chosen comes from an
extremely old Saturday Night Live skit – the Scotch Boutique:
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78bscotch.phtml
This study, like so many, was done on college students. I liked having a lot of choice when I was a college student because I felt that it was important to buy the precise product that helped express my supposedly unique personality.
Now, I don’t care, so I shop at Costco, where they don’t give me much choice. I don’t see a lot of college students at Costco, but I sure see a lot of grown-ups.
I’m still waiting to find out which blogger Tyler finds so obnoxious. Is it Lawrence Auster???
What is the source of this “real life observation?” Is that the same as the uninformed, circumstantial impression of the author? Chipotle does well and they don’t offer a lot of choices…
Answering my own question, there’s an ungated version here:
http://www.scheibehenne.de/ScheibehenneGreifenederTodd2009.pdf
“Can you picture the sad sacks that are actually less happy because there just too many choices at the grocery store? Maybe there should be assertiveness training in high school, because that is just pathetic.
Maybe there are real life people that can’t make decisions, but this is mostly some half assed anti-capitalism argument.”
Toxic is the winner.
I prefer large amounts of choice because that enables me to implement my normal heuristic algorithm for buying product:
1. Search amazon for product – look for product of reasonable value, large number of reviews (>200 considered certain) and a high customer review (at worst slightly less than 5 stars)
2. buy it (can’t buy it from Amazon because I am in Canada) at cheapest possible price.
I am generally very satisfied with my choices and my regret is close tozero. However If I can’t get my choice because its not locally available I get annoyed.
I think the really interesting issue here is that people often choose things that make them unhappy. This study might be one example – that consumers choose more choice even when having more choice makes for a less satisfying life experience. Dan Gilbert gives a nice example in his 2005 TED Talk – that college students always prefer a choice between 2 paintings to a choice of 1 even though they end up more satisfied when a 3rd party constrains them from the beginning.
To me, all of this literature seems to be cataloging the struggle between humans and their own evolved biology. For example, if Happiness serves as a biological choice-ranking tool, then our own behavior is not at all aligned with happiness-maximizing. If anything, we’re pretty much doomed to being less-than-happy at any given point in time (http://www.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/cirje/research/workshops/micro/documents/rayo.pdf). It always frustrates me when my econ professors use utility and happiness interchangeably…
Shouldn’t any blogger who argues against choice be required to recant, shut down their blog, or issue incontrovertible proof that the existence of their blog is a net positive? It seems like extreme hubris for them to think that the choice they offer is worth any more than the negative-valued choices anyone else is offering.
It’s a stumper.
It seems clear to me that people do not like choice in areas which they do not not care about. That is why lab experiments in making choice among arbitrary products show confusing results. It is also far less likely you will have the knowledge to justify a choice if you have no interest in the products, so when asked to justify choices, people are put off.
Say to a a piston-head there are too many choices of cars and they disagree, however many people would be happy with a standard family saloon car being the entire market. Ask yourself are there too many books published, or too many economics blogs ?
I remember going to CVS to buy antibiotic ointment. They probably had around 2 dozen types of germ killing products (I think something on the order of 15 ointments and a bunch of other products — iodine, hydrogen peroxide, several types of alcohol, etc.)
How was I to know which one to buy? Where there substantial differences between them? Most of the ointments seemed to be a couple of different active ingredients in different permutations or amounts, but I had no idea which would be best for my situation.
What did I do in the end? I bought several in hopes that at least one would be useful. So CVS was more successful. I was not.
I don’t think there’s much debate that shops that offer more consumer choice tend to be more successful. That’s the Darwinian explanation for why so many shops offer many products. Do consumers benefit from this? That is another story completely.
Yes, Toxic wins the thread.
What a calamity it is to have the freedom to choose amongst so many options on so many things. I don’t doubt that many people are overwhelmed by this plethora of options, but what is the alternative in almost all these cases?
Trieu said: Is this about health care?
Yes. Another valiant Libertarian defense of the right to swindle every mark.
Now, I don’t care, so I shop at Costco, where they don’t give me much choice. I don’t see a lot of college students at Costco, but I sure see a lot of grown-ups.
A lot of college students don’t have cars. And those that do can do a week’s worth of grocery shopping in 20 minutes on about $50 — meaning you will likely miss seeing them. Costco makes a lot more sense for people with families who drive SUVs or minivans rather than car-less, broke college kids.
In any case, the point about stores offering more choice being more successful misses the point. A specialty store selling only different varieties of bread and cheese may not have much choice in the grand scheme of things but allows people who are picky about those kinds of things to shop at the specialty store for bread and cheese and then hit up Safeway or Costco for toilet paper and laundry detergent.
Choice is at its worst when you have to investigate lots of different options on something you wouldn’t otherwise care about just to avoid getting hosed. Cell phone or long-distance plans, life insurance and credit cards are all examples that come to mind. If the options are straightforward and easy to understand and you have a menu of prices, then having a choice is great. If you don’t care, you can just pick the cheapest option and be done with it.
Thats easy, its because utility theory is complete bunk. People don’t chose what makes them happiest unless you circularly define happiest as whatever people chose.
Simply put, people often chose things that make them miserable because they feel they should, or because they want “the best.” /Happiness/ is fairly irrelevant to most people. A better theory would look a goal fulfillment, of which happiness can be a member, but is non exclusive.
Computer science has already dealt with the issue of “too many choices”. Its a problem only when you don’t have sensible defaults. All of the newest development frameworks are going this route.
Have a menu with 200 items on it? Make the most popular choices clear. Let those who want to choose between 200 different meals do so, and the people who want some choices made for them do so as well. Complexity can be optional. Metachoices are choices too, and can allow users to traverse the space of all possible choices more quickly.
I believe, or at at least I read, that one of the first, decisive strategies Steve Jobs did when rejoining Apple was to drastically reduce their product line.
Bob: my guess that there is a difference between offering several kind of vegetables (no need to shop at other produce stands) and only offering variants of the same produce (e.g. 20 kinds of potatoes).
what is this real life you talk of?
Can be investigated under lab conditions?
Restaurants and choice:
-First, having more choices may reduce the quality of each (given limited chef resources).
-Second, it seems to me that nice restaurants almost never have long, complex menus.
German students, hmmm…… hard to miss Aldi and Lidl in Germany.
Apple?
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