IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/feemet/12188.html

Choosing to Have Less Choice

Author

Listed:
  • Salgado, Maria

Abstract

This paper investigates choice between opportunity sets. I argue that individuals may prefer to have fewer options for two reasons: First, smaller choice sets may provide information and reduce the need for the agent to contemplate the alternatives. Second, contemplation costs may be increasing in the size of the choice set, making smaller sets more desirable even when they do not provide any information to the agent. I identify which of these reasons drives individual behavior in a laboratory experiment. I find strong support for both the information and cognitive overload arguments. The effects do not disappear as participants gain experience with the task. Applications of these results include firms' choices of product variety, as costs increase with the number of products offered, and the design of government policies, such as the Medicare Drug Discount Card Program, in which older citizens can choose among numerous cards for discounts in prescription drugs.

Suggested Citation

  • Salgado, Maria, 2006. "Choosing to Have Less Choice," Economic Theory and Applications Working Papers 12188, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM).
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:feemet:12188
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.12188
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/12188/files/wp060037.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.12188?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. McFadden, Daniel, 1999. "Rationality for Economists?," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 19(1-3), pages 73-105, December.
    2. Kreps, David M, 1979. "A Representation Theorem for "Preference for Flexibility"," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 47(3), pages 565-577, May.
    3. Malhotra, Naresh K, 1982. "Information Load and Consumer Decision Making," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 8(4), pages 419-430, March.
    4. Charles A. Holt & Susan K. Laury, 2002. "Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(5), pages 1644-1655, December.
    5. Bertrand, Marianne & Karlan, Dean S. & Mullainathan, Sendhil & Shafir, Eldar & Zinman, Jonathan, 2005. "What's Psychology Worth? A Field Experiment in the Consumer Credit Market," Center Discussion Papers 28441, Yale University, Economic Growth Center.
    6. Faruk Gul & Wolfgang Pesendorfer, 2001. "Temptation and Self-Control," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 69(6), pages 1403-1435, November.
    7. Jacoby, Jacob, 1984. "Perspectives on Information Overload," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 10(4), pages 432-435, March.
    8. Bikhchandani, Sushil & Hirshleifer, David & Welch, Ivo, 1992. "A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change in Informational Cascades," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 100(5), pages 992-1026, October.
    9. Loomes, Graham & Sugden, Robert, 1982. "Regret Theory: An Alternative Theory of Rational Choice under Uncertainty," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 92(368), pages 805-824, December.
    10. Ravenscraft, David J, 1983. "Structure-Profit Relationships at the Line of Business and Industry Level," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 65(1), pages 22-31, February.
    11. Barry L. Bayus & William P. Putsis, Jr., 1999. "Product Proliferation: An Empirical Analysis of Product Line Determinants and Market Outcomes," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 18(2), pages 137-153.
    12. Manski, Charles F., 2000. "Identification problems and decisions under ambiguity: Empirical analysis of treatment response and normative analysis of treatment choice," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 95(2), pages 415-442, April.
    13. Michaela Draganska & Dipak C. Jain, 2005. "Product‐Line Length as a Competitive Tool," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 14(1), pages 1-28, March.
    14. Abhijit V. Banerjee, 1992. "A Simple Model of Herd Behavior," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 107(3), pages 797-817.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ortoleva, Pietro, 2013. "The price of flexibility: Towards a theory of Thinking Aversion," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 148(3), pages 903-934.
    2. Andrew Caplin & Mark Dean & Daniel Martin, 2011. "Search and Satisficing," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(7), pages 2899-2922, December.
    3. David Goldreich & Hanna Hałaburda, 2013. "When Smaller Menus Are Better: Variability in Menu-Setting Ability," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 59(11), pages 2518-2535, November.
    4. Spears Dean, 2011. "Intertemporal Bounded Rationality as Consideration Sets with Contraction Consistency," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 11(1), pages 1-16, June.
    5. Kaiser Karen, 2011. "Variety Aversion and Information Overload: An Experimental Approach," Working Papers 2011-01, Banco de México.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Maria Salgano, 2006. "Choosing to Have Less Choice," Working Papers 2006.37, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    2. Kaiser Karen & Schwabe Rainer, 2012. "Preference for Variety," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 12(1), pages 1-32, January.
    3. Barbara Kahn & Alexander Chernev & Ulf Böckenholt & Kate Bundorf & Michaela Draganska & Ryan Hamilton & Robert Meyer & Klaus Wertenbroch, 2014. "Consumer and managerial goals in assortment choice and design," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 25(3), pages 293-303, September.
    4. Marek Jenöffy, 2023. "Can the Seesaw Model Depict the Certainty Effect?," Working Papers hal-04136569, HAL.
    5. G. Rejikumar & Aswathy Asokan-Ajitha & Sofi Dinesh & Ajay Jose, 2022. "The role of cognitive complexity and risk aversion in online herd behavior," Electronic Commerce Research, Springer, vol. 22(2), pages 585-621, June.
    6. Rodriguez-Lara, Ismael & Ponti, Giovanni, 2017. "Social motives vs social influence: An experiment on interdependent time preferences," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 177-194.
    7. Katharine G. Abraham & Emel Filiz-Ozbay & Erkut Y. Ozbay & Lesley J. Turner, 2022. "Effects of the Menu of Loan Contracts on Borrower Behavior," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(1), pages 509-528, January.
    8. Daniele Pennesi, 2020. "Identity and information acquisition," Carlo Alberto Notebooks 610, Collegio Carlo Alberto, revised 2021.
    9. Daniele Pennesi, 2021. "Between Commitment and Flexibility: Revealing Anticipated Regret and Elation," Working papers 071, Department of Economics, Social Studies, Applied Mathematics and Statistics (Dipartimento di Scienze Economico-Sociali e Matematico-Statistiche), University of Torino.
    10. Jacobs Martin, 2016. "Accounting for Changing Tastes: Approaches to Explaining Unstable Individual Preferences," Review of Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 67(2), pages 121-183, August.
    11. Zhang, Cong & Pan, Siyu & Zhao, Yanhui, 2024. "More is not always better: Examining the drivers of livestream sales from an information overload perspective," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    12. Edoardo Gallo & Alastair Langtry, 2020. "Social networks, confirmation bias and shock elections," Papers 2011.00520, arXiv.org.
    13. Tom Wilkening, 2009. "The Informational Properties of Institutions: An Experimental Study of Persistence in Markets with Certification," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 1087, The University of Melbourne.
    14. Senthil K. Veeraraghavan & Laurens G. Debo, 2011. "Herding in Queues with Waiting Costs: Rationality and Regret," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 13(3), pages 329-346, July.
    15. Cheng Yi & Zhenhui (Jack) Jiang & Mi Zhou, 2023. "Investigating the effects of product popularity and time restriction: The moderating role of consumers’ goal specificity," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 32(9), pages 2723-2739, September.
    16. W. Viscusi & Owen Phillips & Stephan Kroll, 2011. "Risky investment decisions: How are individuals influenced by their groups?," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 43(2), pages 81-106, October.
    17. Cooper, David J. & Rege, Mari, 2011. "Misery loves company: Social regret and social interaction effects in choices under risk and uncertainty," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 91-110, September.
    18. Bougheas, Spiros & Nieboer, Jeroen & Sefton, Martin, 2015. "Risk taking and information aggregation in groups," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 34-47.
    19. Mark Heitmann & Andreas Herrmann & Christian Kaiser, 2007. "The effect of product variety on purchase probability," Review of Managerial Science, Springer, vol. 1(2), pages 111-131, August.
    20. Rodriguez-Lara, Ismael & Ponti, Giovanni, 2017. "Social Motives vs Social Influence: an Experiment on Time Preferences," MPRA Paper 76486, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:feemet:12188. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/feemmit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.