Choice Overload Research Articles

Consumer reactions to technology in retail: choice uncertainty and reduced perceived control in decisions assisted by recommendation agents

The emergence of artificial intelligence technologies, such as recommendation agents, presents new challenges and opportunities for marketing. Recommendation agents assist consumers in their online grocery shopping decisions by analyzing data on preferences and behaviors. This research highlights that while recommendation agents can reduce choice overload and make purchase decisions easier for consumers, they are also associated with higher uncertainty in decision-making. Three experimental studies confirmed that purchases aided by recommendation agents are perceived as more uncertain and reduced perceptions of control over the choices explain this outcome. Furthermore, lower choice satisfaction and purchase intentions are confirmed as consequences of perceived uncertainty. Personal characteristics such as risk aversion and maximization tendencies are considered boundary conditions for these effects.

Using Neural and Graph Neural Recommender Systems to Overcome Choice Overload: Evidence From a Music Education Platform

The application of recommendation technologies has been crucial in the promotion of physical and digital content across numerous global platforms such as Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. Our study aims to investigate the advantages of employing recommendation technologies on educational platforms, with a particular focus on an educational platform for learning and practicing music. Our research is based on data from Tomplay, a music platform that offers sheet music with professional audio recordings, enabling users to discover and practice music content at varying levels of difficulty. Through our analysis, we emphasize the distinct interaction patterns on educational platforms like Tomplay, which we compare with other commonly used recommendation datasets. We find that interactions are comparatively sparse on educational platforms, with users often focusing on specific content as they learn, rather than interacting with a broader range of material. Therefore, our primary goal is to address the issue of data sparsity. We achieve this through entity resolution principles and propose a neural network (NN)-based recommendation model. Further, we improve this model by utilizing graph neural networks (GNNs), which provide superior predictive accuracy compared to NNs. Notably, our study demonstrates that GNNs are highly effective even for users with little or no historical preferences (cold-start problem). Our cold-start experiments also provide valuable insights into an independent issue, namely, the number of historical interactions needed by a recommendation model to gain a comprehensive understanding of a user. Our findings demonstrate that a platform acquires a solid knowledge of a user’s general preferences and characteristics with 50 past interactions. Overall, our study makes significant contributions to information systems research on business analytics and prescriptive analytics. Moreover, our framework and evaluation results offer implications for various stakeholders, including online educational institutions, education policymakers, and learning platform users.

Technology Focus: Well Testing (February 2024)

Standing alone as the shortest month of the year, February also features JPT’s Well Testing Technology Focus, reviewing the latest industry publications on the subject. Well testing has enjoyed a recent uptick in activity and interest as operators continually realize the value in understanding and monitoring the dynamic performance of their reservoirs. Whether it pertains to the deliverability of conventional oil and gas or the storage potential for carbon capture and storage, large-scale dynamic data remains one of the more coveted pieces to the subsurface puzzle. There is no silver bullet for reservoir characterization. Instead, proper characterization will always be the result of integrating static and dynamic data, collected at varying scales, with a macro geological understanding. Technology facilitates the collection of the aforementioned data. With the latest technologies pushing limits of what can be achieved, subsurface engineers must rigorously evaluate what reservoir characterization techniques and tools are suited for project objectives. Formation testing (FT) platforms provide many options for operators to get a first look at dynamic reservoir performance and nearly always precede a well test. After digesting the alphabet soup of acronyms, so many FT options exist that one may encounter what psychologists refer to as “choice overload.” FT objectives also may begin to overlap with objectives traditionally reserved for drillstem tests (DSTs), narrowing a long-standing technology gap. The current advances in FT tools are exciting, and using FT tools to perform a “mini-DST” makes for brilliant marketing. However, “mini” could mean up to 10,000 times less produced volume, which undoubtedly affects objectives thought to overlap. Subsurface complexity is mitigated by defining clear objectives and executing data-collection programs to reduce uncertainty. Caution should be taken in selecting how to dynamically test your reservoirs. Regardless of how advanced hardware becomes, achievable objectives always will be dependent on key factors such as rock and fluid properties, reservoir geometry, and local regulatory and environmental considerations. This month’s papers highlight ongoing developments from different segments of the well-testing discipline. Dive into valuable lessons learned from a frontier carbon capture, use, and storage project, backed by an impressively sized data set and an in‑depth review of multiphase effects. This case study covers differing saturations around the wellbore region and fluid types in operations and should have global applications. Learn about the limitations and potential pitfalls of nonisothermal effects in pressure transient analysis, which pose challenges in the reservoir characterization of geothermal wells. Sensitivities to thermal effects on reservoir rock properties provide intriguing insights. Completion efficiency also may be affected by thermal effects, resulting in additional pressure drop at sandface. Finally, catch up on one of the weapons most recently added to the well-testing arsenal with powerful new FT tools that feature industry improvements for greater flexibility and improved data reliability. Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org. OTC 32610 Multiphase Flowmeter Comparison in a Complex Field by Mohammed Alqahtani, Saudi Aramco, et al. IPTC 23050 Frequently Asked Questions in the Interval Pressure Transient Test and What Is Next With Deep Transient Test by Saifon Daungkaew, SLB, et al.

Empowered or overwhelmed? Procrastination extinguishes the positive effects of work flexibility on work–family conflict

AbstractProviding flexibility at work is the most pervasive tool for organizations to help employees manage the work–family (WF) interface. Extant research, however, indicates that flexibility does not consistently reduce WF conflict. This paper reports on two studies that contribute to our understanding of how, and for whom, perceived work flexibility improves these outcomes. We extend work on the mechanisms by which flexibility influences outcomes and extend conservation of resources theory using choice overload theory to understand the boundaries of flexibility as a positive resource, specifically, in the form of procrastination. In Study 1, we found that perceived work flexibility was negatively related to subjective work demand for those low on procrastination. In Study 2, we replicate these effects and extend them by finding that effects of flexibility on WF conflict were mediated by its influence on subjective work demand. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research and practice around flexibility in the WF interface.

The impact of individual short-term memory capacity on choice overload effect: Is there stimulus specificity?

The impact of individual short-term memory capacity on choice overload effect: Is there stimulus specificity?

The Impact of Choice Overload on Consumers

Choice overload is a phenomenon in which consumers are faced with an overabundance of choices and information in modern society, leading to increased anxiety, fatigue and uncertainty. With the popularity of the Internet and the rise of social media, consumers have easy access to a wide variety of information and products. However, this also means that consumers need to spend more time and effort to sift through and compare different options. With the plethora of choices available, some consumers may feel overwhelmed, leading to decision-making difficulties and a regret mentality. Choice overload has a profound effect on consumers which exposing consumers to increased decision-making distress. This paper will classify the existing views from three aspects (impact of choice, consumer choice psychological mechanism and triggers of choice). On this basis, we give the merchants in the problem of the relevant solutions. For example, merchants can also take steps to help consumers cope with the effects of choice overload. They can provide clear and unambiguous product information, streamline the shopping process, and offer personalized recommendations and suggestions to reduce consumers' choice burden.

Navigating the Mutual Fund Maze: Understanding and Alleviating Choice Overload for Retail Investors

Navigating the Mutual Fund Maze: Understanding and Alleviating Choice Overload for Retail Investors

More is more: toddlers do not show choice overload

Psychological theory and research demonstrate the positive effects of personal choice on human motivation. However, there is evidence in adults that an overabundance of options can lead to choice overload, when choices become demotivating. Little is known about the early development of behaviors involving choice. Across two studies, we investigated whether toddlers (M age = 2.5 years) preferred choice over non-choice and tested for the presence of choice overload using a novel sticker-book task. Moreover, we explored associations between children's executive function (EF) skills and choice preference behavior. In Study 1 (N = 106), children preferred choice on 70% of trials, and this preference increased as a function of the number of options from 2-26. There was no evidence of choice overload. Study 2 (N = 52) replicated findings from Study 1 with up to 53 options, but there was no linear effect. Age (inversely) and sex (female) predicted choice preference in Study 2. Some aspects of parent-reported EF were inversely related to children's preference for choice, whereas a direct assessment of EF was positively correlated, independent of age. Future research should test for choice overload using alternative measures with a wider age range and clarify associations between EF and choice preference.

Psychological Factors of Vaccination Intent among Healthcare Providers, Parents, and Laypeople.

The interrelatedness of social-structural aspects and psychological features with vaccination intention provides the context to explore personal psychological features related to vaccination. Specifically, we focused on general decision making and vaccine-related dispositions, and their contribution to the intention to vaccinate, within post-pandemic circumstances, after the imposed possibility of choosing a vaccine brand. Our study aimed to map the function (promotive, protective, risk, vulnerability) of a set of personal psychological aspects in the intention to vaccinate among people holding different social roles regarding the vaccination. We surveyed three samples of people: healthcare providers (HPs), parents, and laypeople, within the post-pandemic context. Negative vaccine attitudes lower intention to vaccinate in all regression models (all βs ranging from -0.128 to -0.983, all ps < 0.01). The main results indicate that, regardless of the sample/social role, there is a shared attitudinal core for positive vaccination intention. This core consists of [high] trust in large corporations, government, and healthcare systems, as well as perceived consensus on vaccine safety/efficacy and experience of freedom (protective factors), and [low] vaccination conspiracy beliefs, trust in social media, and choice overload (risk and vulnerability factors, respectively). There are no common promotive factors of intention to vaccinate: for parents, perceived consensus on vaccines, and trust in corporations and the healthcare system, play such roles; for HPs, the experience of freedom is obtained as a unique promotive factor. In contrast, for laypeople, no unique promotive factors were found. Our findings provide insights into the function of psychological factors of vaccination intention across different social roles, particularly healthcare providers, parents, and laypeople, and emphasize the need for tailored immunization interventions in the post-pandemic landscape.

The Paradox of Choice in Healthcare: Treating Decision Paralysis

It is widely accepted that having more choices is inherently positive. When there are more available options from which to choose, an individual is more likely to be able to select the particular option that is the best fit and most likely to satisfy them. Hence, choice is typically thought to be related to personal freedom and enhanced well-being. Therefore, for most individuals the ultimate goal is to constantly maximize their choices in life to increase their overall satisfaction and well-being. The decision-making process, however, is a complex cognitive task that does not always lead to positive outcomes. In this article we discuss the decision-making process under the paradox of choice model. We shed light on the paradoxical relationship that increased choice has in the medical practice: instead of giving individuals the freedom to choose the best course of action to improve their overall satisfaction and well-being, overwhelming individuals with too much choice is actually found to be associated with decision paralysis, dissatisfaction, and diminished well-being. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to the consequences of choice overload in healthcare, and to help both practitioners and patients to avoid decision paralysis.

ChatGPT for Trip Planning: The Effect of Narrowing Down Options

ChatGPT is expected to have significant implications for trip planning from a traveler’s perspective. ChatGPT has the potential to be a revolutionary search tool, enabling travelers to bypass an often complicated and disturbing process with a simple conversation with ChatGPT. This research aimed to explain the impact of ChatGPT on travelers’ trip planning behavior; specifically, it examined how travelers perceive ChatGPT when they narrow down multiple travel options. Based on the choice overload effect, we conducted five experimental studies to determine the negative effect of reducing options from the initial recommendations using ChatGPT. The results showed the importance of a hybrid decision-making process involving both humans and ChatGPT. Using our empirical results, we provide significant theoretical and practical implications for travelers’ trip planning behavior incorporating ChatGPT.

A menu dependent Luce model with a numeraire

This paper proposes and characterizes a simple extension to the Luce rule when the value of each alternative can be enhanced or diminished by a non-negative menu dependent parameter that can be thought of as a measure of menu complexity. The characterization follows from two properties that hinge on the default option: monotone consistency and strong independent log-odds. We make no restriction on the domain of menus so that we may not see choice probabilities from every menu. For these models, we show it is possible to describe choice overload where the default option is chosen more often as menu size increases. It is also shown how this model relates to the class of perturbed utility models.

The Impact of Choice Overload on Decision Deferral in Cybersecurity

Since a large area of cybersecurity research is technically centered but most cyber incidents are human enabled (Nobles, 2018), a shift in focus towards behavioral issues is imperative to improve the understanding of these problems. Research in behavioral economics shows that cognitive biases can impact the decision-making process. For example, a seminal study conducted by Iyengar and Lepper (2000) reveals that a large array of product options attracted customers to browse, but fewer choices got them to buy. Similar research shows that when presented with a large array of options, customers tend to defer decisions, search for alternatives, or even opt not to choose (Dhar, 1997; Shafir, Simonson and Tversky, 1993). Choice overload bias, also known as over-choice, choice paralysis, or the paradox of choice, describes how individuals get overwhelmed when presented with a large number of options to choose from. While we tend to assume that more choice is a good thing (Ryan and Deci, 2001), behavioral economics related research has shown that people have a harder time choosing from a larger array of options (Chernev, Böckenholt and Goodman, 2015). This study translates extant behavioral economics based research on choice overload from various disciplines (e.g., business, public administration, medical science, sociology) and explores its impact on cybersecurity.

Estimating assortment size effects on platforms: Leveraging imperfect geographic targeting for causal inference

Customers of two‐sided platforms may succumb to choice overload due to the frequently overwhelming assortment in such markets. We investigate the effect of assortment size on consumers' purchase probability using a unique click‐stream dataset from a large peer‐to‐peer meal delivery platform. To resolve the key endogeneity challenge that assortment size may be larger in areas where consumers experience greater utility from purchase, we introduce a novel causal inference strategy that exploits a common but imperfect geographic targeting tool employed by the platform: limiting kitchens to a set of fixed delivery radii. We argue and show through simulation exercises that true assortment size effects on purchase probability can be estimated when we employ clustering algorithms to recover and account for neighborhoods that may be targeted by suppliers. Applying our causal inference strategy to the home‐cooked delivery setting, we find that purchase rate effects of assortment size are rapidly diminishing. In fact, our findings suggest that up to 18% of active users experience choice overload. These effects persist despite accounting for potential pricing, assortment variety, and personalization confounds and are robust to nonparametric specifications and accounting for unobserved heterogeneity in assortment effects. We further document the novel moderating role of new‐to‐user and off‐platform options on assortment size effects.

Spoilt for choice: Do female mosquitoes experience choice overload when deciding where to lay eggs?

Animals live in complex natural environments. Based on the effects of natural selection, theory on animal information use says that it is optimal for animals to make "rational" decisions, i.e., to choose alternatives which maximize fitness gains, irrespective of the number of alternatives presented to them. Yet, animals commonly make seemingly “irrational” choices in the face of complex and variable stimuli that challenge their cognitive machinery. Here, we test the choice overload hypothesis – decision-making is negatively affected when animals experience an overload of choice. Using simultaneous-choice trials that varied in choice repertoire size, we examined oviposition site selection behaviour in Aedes aegypti towards larval predators, the nymphs of Bradinopyga geminata. Based on the underlying fitness trade-offs of oviposition decision-making, we predicted that female oviposition preference would be weaker and variation in this response would be higher in complex, multiple-choice trials than in binary-choice trials. In partial support of our hypothesis, oviposition preference was weaker in the complex, multiple-choice trials, but the variation in response depended on predator density, and did not depend on choice repertoire size. We suggest that information overload can negatively affect certain aspects of animal decision-making, resulting in choices appearing as “irrational” if the complexity of the decision-making context is not incorporated. Information overload can potentially lead to alternative strategies, such as bet-hedging or decision-making with reduced discrimination.

Catering to the impatient digital listener: Accelerated composition patterns in popular music, 1986–2020

The present study explored trends of compositional acceleration in top hit songs as a potential consequence of streaming platforms and digital habits of music consumption. Many media users have been shifting towards ‘Permanently online, permanently connected’ ( Vorderer et al., 2018 ) behaviors and are thus likely to face choice overload in many episodes of music consumption. In turn, the creative audio industries seem to adjust strategically to altered audience demands that platforms can identify in their mass data traces. Extending a study by Léveillé Gauvin (2018) , we investigate five compositorial features (main tempo, time before voice enters, time before title is mentioned, number of words in song title, and song duration) for Billboard top 10 songs (1986 to 2020) and ‘Spotify’ top 10 songs (2016 to 2020). Across features, long-term trends of accelerated composition have mostly continued in recent years, but only weak evidence was secured for a particular booster effect of the competitive ‘Spotify’ ecology on compositorial acceleration.

Reference dependence and random attention

We explore the ways that a reference point may direct attention. Utilizing a stochastic choice framework, we provide behavioral foundations for the Reference-Dependent Random Attention Model (RD-RAM). Our characterization result shows that preferences may be uniquely identified even when the attention process depends arbitrarily on both the menu and the reference point. We then analyze specific attention processes, characterizing reference-dependent versions of several prominent models of stochastic consideration. Our analysis illustrates which attention processes can accommodate behavioral patterns commonly observed in studies, such as frequency reversals among non-status quo alternatives and choice overload.

Choice Overload in Tourism: Moderating Roles of Hypothetical and Social Distance

The evolution of information and communication technology has enabled travelers to access abundant information and a wide range of available products/services that may satisfy their needs or wants. However, this phenomenon also poses a challenge to travelers who have to choose from an overwhelming collection of travel products. This situation, known as the paradox of choice, may have negative outcomes. This research tested the mechanism of relationships between choice set size and perceived responses to choice overload as affected by psychological distance. Results of multiple scenario-based experimental design studies indicated a negative influence of choice set size on the choice process (e.g., choice complexity/difficulty and task difficulty) in the context of tourism-related choices. This research demonstrated the moderating effects of hypothetical and social distances on the choice process. Therefore, it extended the theory of decision-making and provided important practical implications for tourism marketing.

Decisions with ChatGPT: Reexamining choice overload in ChatGPT recommendations

This research examines how individuals respond differently to recommendation options generated by ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model, in five studies. In contrast to previous research on choice overload, Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that people tend to respond positively to a large number of recommendation options (60 options), revealing diverse consumer perceptions of AI-generated recommendations. Studies 3 and 4 further illustrate the moderating effect of recommendation agents and indicate that choice overload elicits distinct patterns of consumer reactions depending on whether the recommendations are from a human or AI agent. Lastly, Study 5 directly measures consumer preferences for recommendation agents, revealing a general preference for ChatGPT, particularly when a large number of options are available. These findings have significant implications for recommendation system design and user preferences regarding AI-powered recommendations.

Asking your phone or a frontline employee? The influence of in‐store information source on choice overload, responsibility, and confidence among young consumers

AbstractConsumers frequently use mobile phones in a store to search for external information as an alternative to consulting with frontline employees. Mobile phone usage is especially prevalent among young consumers. Drawing on qualitative study results and existing literature, we conceptualize the effects of different in‐store information sources on choice overload, responsibility, and confidence among young consumers, as well as the moderating role of product category knowledge. A field experiment suggests that when knowledge is low, consulting with frontline employees (vs. mobile phone) leads to lower choice overload and, consequently, increases choice confidence. When knowledge is high, these beneficial effects are attenuated. At the same time, young consumers perceive greater choice responsibility when their phone is the information source; however, this does not influence choice confidence. This work contributes to extant literature by extending the knowledge of customer experience at the point of sale, the role of technology usage in in‐store retailing, and the role of frontline employees as an information source. It also provides managerial implications for retailers by highlighting the importance of providing an opportunity for an in‐person frontline employee interaction especially when customers have low product category knowledge.