CeDEx Seminar - Stefania Sitzia (University of East Anglia)

Reassessing choice overload:  How larger choice sets can induce higher-quality choices

We show, contrary to some hypotheses about choice overload, that expansions of an individual’s choice set may improve the quality of their decisions even if the additional options are not choiceworthy.  We describe a family of heuristics for choosing from sets of multi-attribute options.  These heuristics look for dominance relations between options and favour (disfavour) options which dominate (are dominated by) others.  We show theoretically how larger choice sets can induce higher quality decisions by providing more information for such heuristics.  We report supporting evidence from an experiment in which subjects faced sets of complex but intuitively described options.