Product Assortment and Consumer Choice: An Interdisciplinary Review

The topic of product assortment has generated a plethora of research across various domains, including economics, analytical and empirical modeling, individual and group decision making, and social psychology. Despite the voluminous assortment research, however, the key findings have remained scattered across domains. In fact, the very domain of assortment research has not been clearly defined, thus complicating the understanding of the current state of assortment research. The goal of this review, therefore, is to define the field of assortment research and outline its key findings. In this context, this review delineates three key domains of assortment research: (1) how consumers perceive the variety of items in an assortment, (2) how consumers choose an item from a given assortment, and (3) how consumers choose among assortments. The key findings in each of these three areas are synthesized in the form of specific research propositions that build on the existing findings and provide guidance for further empirical investigation. By outlining the key findings in each of these three areas, this review offers an integrative framework for understanding the impact of assortment on consumer choice.