When the Choosing Gets Rough: Exploring Incidental Factors that Increase Choice Difficulty

Much research has investigated how consumers make difficult choices (Luce 1998, Nowlis, Dhar and Simonson 2010). To date, choice difficulty is generally considered a fixed property of the choice set, determined by the configuration of alternatives and attribute values. Choices with many alternatives, for instance, are considered more difficult than those with less alternatives (Iyengar and Lepper 2000), and choices between alignable attributes are considered easier than choices between non-alignable attributes (Zhang and Markman 2001). More recent research has begun to explore the notion that choosing from the same choice set can be perceived as more or less difficult based on consumer or situation-specific characteristics (Schrift et al. 2011; Sela and Berger 2012). The papers in this session further this line of inquiry by examining incidental factors that affect choice difficulty and consequently choice incidence.