Abstract
One of the advantages of e-retailers is their capability to provide a large amount of information to consumers. However, when the amount of information exceeds consumers’ information processing capacities, it will lead to worse decision quality and experience, causing the information overload effect. In this study, the event-related potentials (ERPs) were applied to examine the hidden neural mechanism of the impact of information overload on consumers’ decision processes. Behavioral data showed that people would spend more time making decisions when faced with information overload. Neurophysiologically, consumers would invest less attentional resources in the high amount of information (HAI) condition than those in the low amount of information (LAI) condition and lead to less positive P2 amplitudes. The HAI condition would increase decision difficulty than would the LAI condition and result in smaller P3 amplitudes. In addition, an increased late positive component (LPC) was observed for the HAI condition in contrast to the LAI condition, indicating that consumers were more inclined to have decision process regret when consumers were overloaded. We further investigated the dynamic information processing when consumers got over information overload by mining the brain’s time-varying networks. The results revealed that during the decision process and the neural response stage, the central area controlled other brain regions’ activities for the HAI condition, suggesting that people may still consider and compare other important information after the decision process when faced with information overload. In general, this study may provide neural evidence of how information overload affects consumers’ decision processes and ultimately damages decision quality.
Highlights
With the rapid development of information technology, the way of shopping has undergone enormous changes
The current results revealed that the source region switched from the center area (CA) to the right posterior parietal cortex in the low amount of information (LAI) condition, corresponding to the decision process and neural response stage, respectively (Figure 4)
The current findings indicated that information overload might damage the decision process, reflected in decreased P2 and P3 amplitudes and an increased late positive component (LPC) when people faced information overload
Summary
With the rapid development of information technology, the way of shopping has undergone enormous changes. Information Overload Affect Consumers’ Decison information in the online environment because of the infinite shelf space (Chen et al, 2009). The most significant advantage of the internet environment is reducing the time that consumers spent searching for information, enabling them to make informed purchase decisions. In terms of decision behavior, information overload can occupy numerous cognitive resources (Nagar and Gandotra, 2016) and damage decision quality (Jacoby, 1984; Sasaki et al, 2011). Previous studies showed that as the amount of information increased, consumers would feel more negative emotions, less decision satisfaction (Lee and Lee, 2004), and more buyer’s remorse (Inbar et al, 2011; Chernev et al, 2015). Most studies focused only on consumer decisions without an indepth investigation of the cognitive and neural basis involved in consumers’ decision process
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