Special Session Summary the Influence of Choice Sets and Screening Processes on Decision Quality

SESSION OVERVIEW Decision makers are often confronted with a large number of alternatives during the course of their decisions. In order to simplify decision making in such information intensive environments, the set of available alternatives are often divided into subsets by some external (e.g., a product display format at a retail store) or internal (e.g., a screening or decision rule) factors. The primary purpose of these subsets or choice sets is to categorize and organize information in order to facilitate better decision making. For example, retailers organize shelf displays in a manner so as to reduce the effects of information overload, websites often provide screening tools that help consumers order the available options and better match their preferences, and consumers screen alternatives in order to improve the quality of their decisions during the relatively effortful choice stage. In fact, a fairly large body of work supports the intuitive notion that the ability to create and structure these choice sets has a beneficial effect on consumer decision making (e.g., Alba et al. 1997, Haubl and Trifts 1999, Lynch and Ariely 2000). In contrast with this prevailing sentiment, a recent, albeit nascent, body of research (e.g., Iyengar and Lepper 2000, Diehl, Kornish and Lynch 2003, Moorman et al. 2005) provides evidence to the contrary. These papers posit that although the ability to create and structure choice sets allows for easier search, it can often lead to lower decision quality. The three papers in this session contribute to this debate in two very specific ways. First, these papers add to this nascent body of research by providing further evidence that screening mechanisms can be deleterious to decision quality, irrespective of whether these screening mechanisms are internally generated by the consumer (Chakravarti, Janiszewski, and Ülkümen paper) or externally provided by the retailer (Diehl paper; Iyengar and Mogilner paper). They provide strong evidence that activities undertaken at an early stage of decision making, like structuring choice sets and using screening mechanisms, can often have a greater impact on the quality of the final decision than the nature of the deliberations during the final choice phase. Second, and perhaps more importantly, these papers also add to this body of literature by uncovering specific conditions under which these choice sets ameliorate or attenuate the quality of the final decision. Chakravarti, Janiszewski, and Ülkümen show that the task of screening alternatives (e.g., during consideration set formation) induces a non normative tendency to “discard” the screening information in subsequent stages of decision making. This tendency to “discard” the screening information often leads to sub optimal, and systematically different, final choices. In a similar vein, Diehl argues that improving the quality of consumers’ consideration sets will have a bigger impact on decision quality than improving how consumers decide among considered options. Finally, contrary to previous research (Iyengar and Lepper 2000) that cautions against the provision of “too much choice,” Iyengar and Mogliner present evidence that the allure of large product displays can be maintained while alleviating the detrimental consequences of choice overload by delineating smaller consideration sets within large option displays. These papers also benefited immensely from the comments offered by S. Ratti Ratneshwar, the discussant, who helped highlight the commonalties between the different findings. EXTENDED ABSTRACTS