Choice overload or time stress: what determines purchase decisions for airline tickets?

Abstract

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.