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It has been shown that compared with unordered environments, screening tools can benefit consumers. However, this article shows that independent variables that have been associated with better choices in unordered environments are actually detrimental in an ordered environment. These factors included lower search costs, a larger number of recommended options, and increased motivation to be accurate in decision making.

Unlike unordered environments, in ordered environments, there are limited benefits derived from more searching. Because the ordering mechanism has already screened the environment on the basis of consumers’ preferences, searching additional, lower-ranked options from an ordered list offers only a relatively small chance of exposing consumers to better options. Therefore, encouraging more searching from ordered lists undoes the effort-saving and overload-reducing benefits of smart ordering tools. Worse yet, when consumers expose themselves to a worse set of options, they dilute the decision quality benefits that screening tools offer. In an ordered search, being tempted to search more deeply reduces choice quality by reducing the average quality of the consideration set in a way that is not compensated by increased selectivity given the consideration of more (and more mediocre) options. Counterintuitively, this tendency is heightened even further if search costs are low and consumers’ motivation to be accurate is high. In combination with search-inducing factors, greater accuracy motivation encourages consumers to consider a broader range of options (lower-quality consideration sets) more seriously, which ultimately leads to worse choices.

In light of these findings, marketers should also consider the impact of recommendation accuracy and consumer trust. Current work in marketing investigates how personalization techniques can be improved, arguing that both marketers and consumers benefit more when the recommendation to the individual consumer is better. Notably, such improvements in recommendation accuracy would increase the harmfulness of additional consumer search from an ordered list.

Consumers’ trust in these recommendation agents is another important factor for marketers because lack of trust may encourage more searching, thus contributing to worse choices. If consumers believe that marketers are using ordering tools to exploit them, they may search more extensively, trying to find the bargains they expect marketers are purposefully hiding from them. Using ordering tools in this way is a self-fulfilling prophecy because more searching decreases the level of consumer benefit from these tools. Thus, the competitive advantage companies expect to derive from investments in such tools will be low. Therefore, building consumers’ trust in ordering tools and developing long-term relationships with customers is particularly important for marketers.

Biography
Kristin Diehl is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. This article is based on her doctoral dissertation, which she completed at Duke University under the guidance of Jim Bettman and John Lynch. It was completed while she was an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. She holds a degree (Diplom-Kauffrau) from Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz, Germany. Her research focuses on how consumers search for and use information from consideration sets and how they choose from such sets, particularly in electronic environments. Her work has appeared in Journal of Consumer Research and has received an honorable mention for the 2004 Robert Ferber award given by the Association for Consumer Research.

J Marketing Research, Volume 42, Number 3, August 2005
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