Many say that consumers are biased to prefer the middle of three options, and to buy less when offered more options. In the latest American Economic Review, Emir Kamenica shows these need not be biases:
In this paper, I develop a model where uninformed consumers learn payoff-relevant information by observing what goods are available. The tendency to select the middle option thus naturally arises when there are consumers who are unsure which option is best for them, but know their tastes are middlebrow. Choice overload comes as no surprise if excessive product lines reduce consumers' information about which varieties are likely to suit them. …
When many consumers are uninformed, the firm may try to manipulate consumers' beliefs through the set of varieties it offers. In particular, I establish that the firm may introduce premium loss leaders – expensive goods of overly high quality which, though unprofitable on their own, greatly improve the demand for other goods. …
An uninformed consumer can be better off with a smaller choice set. The logic behind this possibility is as follows. A consumer who does not know which variety she likes must choose randomly among the available varieties. In equilibrium, the most popular varieties are introduced, so the average popularity of the available varieties is decreasing in the breadth of the product line. Consequently, the uninformed consumer's expected surplus is greater when there are fewer options.
I expect this actually does explain a lot of this sort of consumer behavior. Choice sets really do typically contain info that we quite reasonably notice. Kamenica's other papers are interesting too, including these speed dating results:
- Women put greater weight on the intelligence and the race of partner, while men respond more to physical attractiveness. Moreover, men do not value women's intelligence or ambition when it exceeds their own. Also, we find that women exhibit a preference for men who grew up in affluent neighborhoods. Finally, male selectivity is invariant to group size, while female selectivity is strongly increasing in group size.
loading...
frelkins 
floccina 
[...] Obama’s campaign or administration. One of the concepts of behavioral economics is the power of the middle option – given three options at three different price points most people aggregate towards the [...]
By The Power Of The Middle Option « Iterative Path October 9, 2009 at 9:38 am
[...] in which employment grows at 472,000 jobs per month, as it did in the best month in the 200s; and a middle option, in which employment grows at 321,000 jobs, as it did in 1994. The takeaway from the graph, [...]
By Fun with Scenario Planning « Contrarian Moderate December 22, 2011 at 1:41 pm