The impact of media richness on consumer information search and choice

Consumers' make decisions based on information gathered from sources that vary in the richness of the medium. Some media are rich, and include video and audio components, while others are lean and consist solely of text. This paper examines whether consumer's information search and the number of options that they consider when making choices depend on the richness of the medium from which consumers gather information. A series of experimental studies shows that an improvement in media richness reduces the cost of information search and increases the number of options that consumers consider when making choices. These studies also show that consumers tend to rely more on stimulus-based information when media richness is high and more on memory-based information when media richness is low. An investigation of the underlying process shows that perceived cost mediates the relationship between media richness and information search.