Does the procedure matter?

When searching for which products to buy, consumers are typically bombarded with options. Some suppliers try and simplify the issue of decision-making for their potential buyers in some way. One typical procedure used to ease the decision-making process for potential customers is to present the products in sequential pages and request shoppers to select an item from each page, entering them into a wish list from which the final choice will be made. This study experimentally investigates how the final decision is affected by the number of items on each page and, hence, by the number of items in a wish list. The parameters of a stochastic model are estimated to ‘explain’ the data, in particular, examining the noisiness of the choices at each stage. The results show that procedure matters and that the trade-off between an increased number of options per page and an increased number of pages is indeed influential.