Aner Sela

Variety, Vice, and Virtue: How Assortment Size Influences Option Choice

Assortment size has been shown to influence whether consumers make a choice, but could it also influence what they choose? Five studies demonstrate that because choosing from larger assortments is often more difficult, it leads people to select options that are easier to justify. Virtues and utilitarian necessities are generally easier to justify than indulgences; consequently, choosing from larger assortments often shifts choice from vices to virtues and from hedonic to utilitarian options. These effects reverse, however, when situational factors provide accessible reasons to indulge, underscoring the role of justification. Implications for choice difficulty and justification processes are discussed.

Decision Quicksand: How Trivial Choices Suck Us In

People often get unnecessarily mired in trivial decisions. Four studies support a metacognitive account for this painful phenomenon. Our central premise is that people use subjective experiences of difficulty while making a decision as a cue to how much further time and effort to spend. People generally associate important decisions with difficulty. Consequently, if a decision feels unexpectedly difficult, due to even incidental reasons, people may draw the reverse inference that it is also important and consequently increase the amount of time and effort they expend. Ironically, this process is particularly likely for decisions that initially seemed unimportant because people expect them to be easier (whereas important decisions are expected to be difficult to begin with). Our studies demonstrate that unexpected difficulty not only causes people to get caught up in unimportant decisions but also to voluntarily seek more options, which can increase decision difficulty even further.

How Attribute Quantity Influences Option Choice

Products can be described by different numbers of attributes, but can the mere number of attributes presented across a choice set influence what type of options people choose? This article demonstrates that attribute numerosity tends to benefit certain types of options more than others and consequently has systematic effects on choice. Because attributes often serve as a heuristic cue for product usefulness, they benefit options that people perceive as relatively inferior on this dimension. Consistent with this perspective, five studies demonstrate that attribute numerosity benefits hedonic more than utilitarian options by increasing the extent to which the former appear useful. Consequently, increasing attribute quantity equally across the choice set shifts choice toward hedonic options, regardless of whether the attributes are hedonic, utilitarian, or mixed in nature. Consistent with this conceptualization, these effects become amplified when decision makers engage in heuristic processing and when priming makes usefulness salient. The findings have important implications for how marketers present attribute information, for public policy and consumer welfare, and for understanding argument numerosity effects in persuasion more broadly.

Beating the Market: The Allure of Unintended Value

Consumers face many options that are presented to them as bargains, but in reality, they only subjectively construe a fraction of them as valuable. The authors propose that consumers are particularly attracted to offers they perceive as more valuable than the marketer presumably intended. Consistent with this analysis, six experiments indicate that consumers may perceive customized offers that are presented as tailored to their individual preferences or circumstances as less valuable than offers that seem to fit their preferences and provide value without the marketers explicit intent. The experiments also suggest that the urge to exploit unintended value reflects a competitive desire to outsmart the market. The findings have theoretical implications for understanding consumers’ subjective perceptions of value as well as important practical implications for designing customized offers and targeted promotions.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Delay Discounting, and Risky Financial Behaviors: A Preliminary Analysis of Self-Report Data

Delay discounting—often referred to as hyperbolic discounting in the financial literature—is defined by a consistent preference for smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards, and by failure of future consequences to curtail current consummatory behaviors. Previous research demonstrates (1) excessive delay discounting among individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), (2) common neural substrates of delay discounting and hyperactive-impulsive symptoms of ADHD, and (3) associations between delay discounting and both debt burden and high interest rate borrowing. This study extends prior research by examining associations between ADHD symptoms, delay discounting, and an array of previously unevaluated financial outcomes among 544 individuals (mean age 35 years). Controlling for age, income, sex, education, and substance use, ADHD symptoms were associated with delay discounting, late credit card payments, credit card balances, use of pawn services, personal debt, and employment histories (less time spent at more jobs). Consistent with neural models of reward processing and associative learning, more of these relations were attributable to hyperactive-impulsive symptoms than inattentive symptoms. Implications for financial decision-making and directions for future research are discussed.

Preference-Construction Habits: The Case of Extremeness Aversion

We propose that choice construction strategies often meet the criteria for “habits.” As an example of a constructed preference habit, we focus on extremeness aversion, namely, the tendency to prefer a middle or “compromise” option versus an “extreme” option from a given options set. We present evidence that some consumers appear to have a habitual tendency to avoid extreme options that is (1) partly heritable, (2) formed in childhood, and (3) moderated by age and personality traits such as preference for moderation. We discuss the implications of the notion of preference-construction habits and future research directions.

Not My Type: Why Affective Decision Makers Are Reluctant to Make Financial Decisions

Why are people often uncomfortable dealing with financial decisions? We propose that people perceive financial decisions – more so than decisions in many other equally complex and important domains – as compatible with a cold, analytical mode of thinking and as incompatible with feelings and emotions. Consequently, the more people perceive themselves as inclined to rely on affect in their decisions, the more they experience self-concept incongruity with financial decisions (i.e., feeling that financial decisions are “not them�?), and consequently show an increased tendency to avoid such decisions. Five studies demonstrate this phenomenon using both consequential and hypothetical decisions, provide evidence for the proposed mechanism, and rule out alternative accounts, including perceived financial knowledge, expertise and self-efficacy perceptions, decision confidence, and preference for numerical information. The findings contribute to research on thinking styles and decision avoidance, and they underscore a characteristic of financial decisions that makes them stand out among many other decision types. In addition to their theoretical significance, the findings have practical implications for the communication of financial products and services.

How Tradeoffs Shrink Attribute Hierarchy

Why do people sometimes struggle with decisions that once seemed relatively simple? This research suggests that comparing options leads people to lose sight of which decision attributes are important. Although the difference between important and unimportant attributes is often clear in the abstract, the act of making tradeoffs highlights what people must forgo on one attribute in exchange for a gain on another, which increases the perceived importance of trivial attributes in particular. This causes the variance in perceived importance across attributes to shrink, blurring the distinction between important and unimportant attributes. Four experiments demonstrate this phenomenon, explore the underlying mechanism, and show how it leads to increased choice difficulty and dissatisfaction with the choice experience.