Previous research has identified choice ov
erload as a potential cause for purchase
deferral. Researchers suggest that the decision difficulties and frustration consumers
experience when processing significant amounts
of information can lead to decision
avoidance and have also found that, consis
tent with such expl
anation, that time
constraints act as a moderator: approach
ing deadlines seems to amplify choice
overload due to an increased cognitive burden. Identifying moderators of choice
overload and discovering contexts in which choice overload occurs is a promising
research direction and more importantly it
is still unclear whether this phenomenon
exists in real business contexts. With th
e present study, we address this gap and study
the interaction between assortment size
and time constraints in a purchase context
dominated by uncertainty. We conducted two
studies to investigate how number of
options and time pressure influence purchase
decisions. Past research in time effects
vary in understanding of time pressure a
nd focus on either real decision deadlines
(physical time) or subjective feeling of pr
essure associated with time (sense of
urgency or psychological time).
We test both the moderati
ng effect of physical time
and psychological time and compare their impact.