Buying Behavior as a Function of Parametric Variation of Number of Choices

There is accumulating evidence that having many options from which to choose may be counterproductive (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000; Iyengar, Well, & Schwartz, 2006; Schwartz, 2004). In the consumer world, Procter & Gamble noticed a 10% increase in sales of its Head & Shoulders brand after they reduced the number of varieties (Goldstein, 2001). Iyengar and Lepper (2000) carried out three experiments in which subjects had to choose from a small set of 6 options or from a larger set of 24 or 30 options. Subjects rated the situation with more options as more pleasant than the situation with fewer options, but purchased more when there were fewer options and were more satisfied with their choices. Most previous research on this topic compared only two set sizes for number of choices: a medium value, such as 6, and a large value, such as 24 (but see Iyengar, Jiang, & Huberman, 2004). We were interested in exploring the influence of number of choices in a more parametric fashion. Several processes might influence buying behavior as the number of choices increases. Presumably, as the number of choices increases, consumers are more likely to find an item that meets their needs. If this is the only process involved, then increasing choice should lead to increased buying. However, as choice increases, consumers are more likely to have two or more items that meet their criteria and are close to one another in subjective value, making the choice difficult. Also, as the number of options increases, the cognitive effort in evaluating those options increases (Keller & Staelin, 1987). We predicted that the interaction of these proposed processes would lead to an inverted-U-shaped function; that is, we predicted that as the number of choices increased, buying would initially increase and then decrease. For the product in our experiment, we chose pens, a commodity that college students are interested in and often purchase. We varied the number of options from 2 to 20 in increments of 2. METHOD