research-article

Public Access

No Such Thing as Too Much Chocolate: Evidence Against Choice Overload in E-Commerce

Authors:

Sarita Y. Schoenebeck,

Katharina ReineckeAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 4358 - 4369

https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025778

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

E-commerce designers must decide how many products to display at one time. Choice overload research has demonstrated the surprising finding that more choice is not necessarily better?selecting from larger choice sets can be more cognitively demanding and can result in lower levels of choice satisfaction. This research tests the choice overload effect in an e-commerce context and explores how the choice overload effect is influenced by an individual's tendency to maximize or satisfice decisions. We conducted an online experiment with 611 participants randomly assigned to select a gourmet chocolate bar from either 12, 24, 40, 50, 60, or 72 different options. Consistent with prior work, we find that maximizers are less satisfied with their product choice than satisficers. However, using Bayesian analysis, we find that it's unlikely that choice set size affects choice satisfaction by much, if at all. We discuss why the decision-making process may be different in e-commerce contexts than the physical settings used in previous choice overload experiments.

Supplementary Material

ZIP File (pn2602-file4.zip)

Download
4.07 MB

References

[1]

Bharath Arunachalam, Shida R. Henneberry, Jayson L. Lusk, and F. Bailey Norwood. 2009. An Empirical Investigation into the Excessive-Choice Effect. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 91, 3: 810--825.

[2]

Dirk Bollen, Bart P. Knijnenburg, Martijn C. Willemsen, and Mark Graus. 2010. Understanding Choice Overload in Recommender Systems. In Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '10), 63--70.

Digital Library

[3]

D. Eric Boyd and Kenneth D. Bahn. 2009. When Do Large Product Assortments Benefit Consumers? An Information-Processing Perspective. Journal of Retailing 85, 3: 288--297.

[4]

Shun Cai, Yunjie Xu, and Jie Yu. 2008. The Effects of Web Site Aesthetics and Shopping Task on Consumer Online Purchasing Behavior. In CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '08), 3477--3482.

Digital Library

[5]

Alexander Chernev. 2011. Product Assortment and Consumer Choice: An Interdisciplinary Review. Foundations and Trends in Marketing 6, 1: 1--61.

[6]

Alexander Chernev. 2011. Product Assortment and Consumer Choice: An Interdisciplinary Review. Foundations and Trends® in Marketing 6, 1: 1--61.

[7]

Alexander Chernev, Böckenholt, and Goodman. 2014. Choice overload: A conceptual review and metaanalysis. Journal of Consumer Psychology.

[8]

Pawitra Chiravirakul and Stephen J. Payne. 2014. Choice Overload in Search Engine Use? In Proceedings of the 32Nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14), 1285--1294.

Digital Library

[9]

Jonathan D. D'Angelo and Catalina L. Toma. 2016. There Are Plenty of Fish in the Sea: The Effects of Choice Overload and Reversibility on Online Daters' Satisfaction With Selected Partners. Media Psychology: 1--27.

[10]

Ilan Dar-Nimrod, Catherine D. Rawn, Darrin R. Lehman, and Barry Schwartz. 2009. The Maximization Paradox: The costs of seeking alternatives. Personality and Individual Differences 46, 5--6: 631--635.

[11]

Kristin Diehl and Cait Poynor. 2010. Great Expectations?! Assortment Size, Expectations, and Satisfaction. Journal of Marketing Research 47, 2: 312--322.

[12]

Zoltan Dienes. 2011. Bayesian Versus Orthodox Statistics: Which Side Are You On? Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, 3: 274--290.

[13]

Pierre Dragicevic. 2016. Fair Statistical Communication in HCI. In Modern Statistical Methods for HCI, Judy Robertson and Maurits Kaptein (eds.). Springer International Publishing, 291--330. Retrieved September 2, 2016 from http://link.springer.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/chapter/1 0.1007/978--3--319--26633--6_13

[14]

C.R. Gallistel. 2009. The importance of proving the null. Psychological Review 116, 2: 439--453.

[15]

Anthony Griffin and Dennis Viehland. 2012. Demographic Factors in Assessing Perceived Risk in Online Shopping. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC '11), 9:1--9:6.

Digital Library

[16]

Gerald Häubl and Pablo Figueroa. 2002. Ineractive 3D Presentations and Buyer Behavior. In CHI '02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '02), 744--745.

Digital Library

[17]

Graeme A. Haynes. 2009. Testing the boundaries of the choice overload phenomenon: The effect of number of options and time pressure on decision difficulty and satisfaction. Psychology and Marketing 26, 3: 204--212.

[18]

Rink Hoekstra, Richard D. Morey, Jeffrey N. Rouder, and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers. 2014. Robust misinterpretation of confidence intervals. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 21, 5: 1157--1164.

[19]

George S. Howard, Scott E. Maxwell, and Kevin J. Fleming. 2000. The proof of the pudding: An illustration of the relative strengths of null hypothesis, meta-analysis, and Bayesian analysis. Psychological Methods 5, 3: 315--332.

[20]

Jessica Hullman, Paul Resnick, and Eytan Adar. 2015. Hypothetical Outcome Plots Outperform Error Bars and Violin Plots for Inferences about Reliability of Variable Ordering. PloS one 10, 11: e0142444.

[21]

Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper. 2000. When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, 6: 995--1006.

[22]

Sheena S. Iyengar, Rachael E. Wells, and Barry Schwartz. 2006. Doing Better but Feeling Worse: Looking for the "Best" Job Undermines Satisfaction. Psychological Science 17, 2: 143--150.

[23]

Eric J. Johnson, Suzanne B. Shu, Benedict G. C. Dellaert, et al. 2012. Beyond nudges: Tools of a choice architecture. Marketing Letters 23, 2: 487--504.

[24]

Matthew Kay, Gregory L. Nelson, and Eric B. Hekler. 2016. Researcher-Centered Design of Statistics: Why Bayesian Statistics Better Fit the Culture and Incentives of HCI. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16), 4521--4532.

Digital Library

[25]

Scott Kessler. 2014. Industry Surveys, Computers: Consumer Services & the Internet. S&P Capital IQ.

[26]

John K. Kruschke. 2010. Bayesian data analysis. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 1, 5: 658--676.

[27]

Khai Sheang Lee and Soo Jiuan Tan. 2003. E-retailing versus physical retailing: A theoretical model and empirical test of consumer choice. Journal of Business Research 56, 11: 877--885.

[28]

Junzhao Ma. 2016. Does Greater Online Assortment Pay? An Empirical Study Using Matched Online and Catalog Shoppers. Journal of Retailing.

[29]

Richard McElreath. 2012. Statistical rethinking R package. R package version 1.

[30]

Richard McElreath. 2016. Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan. CRC Press.

[31]

Shailey Minocha, Marian Petre, Ekaterini Tzanidou, et al. 2006. Evaluating e-Commerce Environments: Approaches to Cross-disciplinary Investigation. In CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '06), 1121--1126.

Digital Library

[32]

Anthony D. Miyazaki and Ana Fernandez. 2001. Consumer Perceptions of Privacy and Security Risks for Online Shopping. Journal of Consumer Affairs 35, 1: 27--44.

[33]

Antti Oulasvirta, Janne P. Hukkinen, and Barry Schwartz. 2009. When More is Less: The Paradox of Choice in Search Engine Use. In Proceedings of the 32Nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '09), 516--523.

Digital Library

[34]

PWC. 2015. Total Retail 2015: Retailers and the Age of Disruption. PricewaterhouseCoopers.

[35]

Elena Reutskaja and Robin M. Hogarth. 2009. Satisfaction in choice as a function of the number of alternatives: When "goods satiate." Psychology and Marketing 26, 3: 197--203.

[36]

Jens Riegelsberger and M. Angela Sasse. 2002. Face It - Photos Don't Make a Web Site Trustworthy. In CHI '02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '02), 742--743.

Digital Library

[37]

Jens Riegelsberger, M. Angela Sasse, and John D. McCarthy. 2003. Shiny Happy People Building Trust?: Photos on e-Commerce Websites and Consumer Trust. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '03), 121--128.

Digital Library

[38]

Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder, and Peter M. Todd. 2009. What moderates the too-muchchoice effect? Psychology and Marketing 26, 3: 229-- 253.

[39]

Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder, and Peter M. Todd. 2010. Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload. Journal of Consumer Research 37, 3: 409-- 425.

[40]

Barry Schwartz. 2004. The paradox of choice: why more is less. ECCO, New York.

[41]

Barry Schwartz, Andrew Ward, John Monterosso, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Katherine White, and Darrin R. Lehman. 2002. Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, 5: 1178--1197.

[42]

Barry Schwartz, Andrew Ward, John Monterosso, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Katherine White, and Darrin R. Lehman. 2002. Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, 5: 1178--1197.

[43]

Avni M. Shah and George Wolford. 2007. Buying Behavior as a Function of Parametric Variation of Number of Choices. Psychological Science 18, 5: 369-- 370.

[44]

Herbert A. Simon. 1996. The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press.

Digital Library

[45]

Statista. 2015. E-commerce in the United States. Statista Dossier. Retrieved from http://www.statista.com/study/28028/e-commerce-inthe-united-states-statista-dossier/

[46]

Ulrike Steinbrück, Heike Schaumburg, Sabrina Duda, and Thomas Krüger. 2002. A Picture Says More Than a Thousand Words: Photographs As Trust Builders in e-Commerce Websites. In CHI '02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '02), 748--749.

Digital Library

[47]

Vertical Web Media LLC. 2015. Top 500 Guide. Internet Retailer.

Cited By

Prakash YNayak ASunkara MJayarathna SLee HAshok V(2024)All in One Place: Ensuring Usable Access to Online Shopping Items for Blind UsersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36646398:EICS(1-25)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664639
Bansal G(2024)Reprogramming the Software of the Mind: A New Framework for Cultural HomogenizationJournal of Global Information Technology Management10.1080/1097198X.2023.229802127:1(1-7)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/1097198X.2023.2298021
Cao HChen ZCheng MZhao SWang TLi Y(2021)You Recommend, I BuyProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34491415:CSCW1(1-25)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449141
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

No Such Thing as Too Much Chocolate: Evidence Against Choice Overload in E-Commerce
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

The paradoxical nature of electronic decision aids on comparison-shopping: the experiments and analysis

Consumers who use electronic decision aids such as comparison-shopping agents may be overwhelmed by the amount of choice information available to them, leading to an inability to choose or dissatisfaction with the ultimate choice, a state of "choice ...
Too much choice: end-user privacy decisions in the context of choice proliferation
SOUPS '14: Proceedings of the Tenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security

Choice proliferation, a research stream in psychology, studies adverse effects of human decision-making as the number of options to choose from increases. We test if these effects can be elicited in a privacy context. Decision field theory suggests two ...
Too much of a good thing: The impact of product variety on operations and sales performance
Abstract
We examine the impact of product variety decisions on an operational measure – unit fill rate – and on sales performance. Results are estimated using weekly data over three years from 108 distribution centers of a major soft drink bottler. Our ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 2017

7138 pages

ISBN:9781450346559

DOI:10.1145/3025453

General Chairs:
Gloria Mark
University of California Irvine
,
Susan Fussell
Cornell University
,
Program Chairs:
Cliff Lampe
University of Michigan
,
m.c. schraefel
University of Southampton
,
Juan Pablo Hourcade
University of Iowa
,
Caroline Appert
Université Paris-Sud
,
Daniel Wigdor
University of Toronto

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 May 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

NSF

Conference

CHI '17

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '17: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 6 - 11, 2017

Colorado, Denver, USA

Acceptance Rates

CHI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 600 of 2,400 submissions, 25%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

7
Total Citations
View Citations
1,526
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)234
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)32

Reflects downloads up to 15 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Prakash YNayak ASunkara MJayarathna SLee HAshok V(2024)All in One Place: Ensuring Usable Access to Online Shopping Items for Blind UsersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36646398:EICS(1-25)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664639
Bansal G(2024)Reprogramming the Software of the Mind: A New Framework for Cultural HomogenizationJournal of Global Information Technology Management10.1080/1097198X.2023.229802127:1(1-7)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/1097198X.2023.2298021
Cao HChen ZCheng MZhao SWang TLi Y(2021)You Recommend, I BuyProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34491415:CSCW1(1-25)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449141
Beierle FAizawa ACollins ABeel J(2020)Choice overload and recommendation effectiveness in related-article recommendationsInternational Journal on Digital Libraries10.1007/s00799-019-00270-721:3(231-246)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00799-019-00270-7
Dillahunt TSimioni SXu XBrewster SFitzpatrick GCox AKostakos V(2019)Online Grocery Delivery ServicesProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300879(1-15)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290605.3300879
Phelan CHullman JKay MResnick PBrewster SFitzpatrick GCox AKostakos V(2019)Some Prior(s) Experience NecessaryProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300709(1-12)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290605.3300709
Moser CMandryk RHancock MPerry MCox A(2018)Impulse BuyingExtended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3170427.3173026(1-4)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3170427.3173026

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents