Having too many choices for a product youre planning to buy is a good thing,according to a new study. Researchers Benjamin Scheibehenne (University of Basel,Switzerland),Rainer Greifeneder (University of Mannheim,Germany),and Peter M. Todd (Indiana University,Bloomington) conducted a meta-analysis of 50 published and unpublished experiments that investigated choice overload. They found that consumers generally respond positively to having many choices. A number of studies in the past found strong instances of choice overload based on experiments in laboratories and in the field. While these results attracted a lot of attention in academia as well as in the media,a number of experiments found no empirical evidence for choice overload and sometimes even found that more choices instead facilitate choice and increase satisfaction, the authors said. Across the 50 experiments,which depict the choices of 5,036 individual participants,the researchers found that the overall effect of choice overload was virtually zero. This suggests that adverse consequences do not necessarily follow from increases in the number of options. In fact,contrary to the notion of choice overload,these results suggest that having many options to choose from will,on average,not lead to a decrease in satisfaction or motivation to make a choice, the authors said. The study has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
