About AMA

Nathan Novemsky, Ravi Dhar, Norbert Schwarz, and Itamar Simonson

Executive Summary
Recent research in psychology has demonstrated that people use their subjective experiences of ease or difficulty while processing information to make inferences about the information they are processing. This article examines how subjective experiences of ease or difficulty that occur during preference formation can influence consumer choice.

In the reported studies, preference formation is made easy or difficult by varying nonconsequential aspects of the choice environment (e.g., options displayed in a difficult to read font). Therefore, any influence of subjective difficulty is not a result of people actually facing a difficult decision but rather of experiencing a feeling of difficulty while they happen to be making a choice.

The authors consider several effects of subjective experiences on preference formation. First, they examine people's tendency to defer a decision. They find that inducing a feeling of difficulty (e.g., by asking for more rather than fewer reasons for the choice) increases the tendency not to choose at all. They also examine a well-known choice effect: the compromise effect. This effect occurs when adding a third option to a two-option choice set increases the share of the now "middle" option compared with the two-option set. The authors find that this effect actually increases when they induce a feeling of difficulty in decision makers.

A key aspect of the proposed model is that the feeling of difficulty at the time of choice must be attributed to the choice for there to be any influence on preference formation. The authors believe that most sources of difficulty irrelevant to the choice are attributed to the choice as long as they occur during the decision process. However, when people's attention is drawn to the specific source of difficulty, the subjective experience no longer influences preferences.

The authors believe that there are several practical implications of this work. For example, superficial aspects of a choice environment (e.g., retail store) should be constructed to make choosing as easy as possible. This increases people's willingness to choose. If there are unavoidable circumstances that make choosing difficult, steps should be taken to make decision makers keenly aware that the sources of the difficulty are separate from the choice, lest they be attributed to the choice.

Biography
Nathan Novemsky is Associate Professor or Marketing at the Yale School of Management and has an affiliate appointment in the psychology department at Yale University. His research focuses on how consumers form preferences and how they integrate their experiences into those preferences. He has published articles in leading decision-making and marketing journals, including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. At Yale, he has taught MBA courses in marketing management and consumer behavior.

Ravi Dhar is George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing and Director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management. He also has an affiliated appointment as Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. His research involves using psychological and economic principles to investigate fundamental aspects of how preferences are formed and constructed to understand and predict consumer behavior in the marketplace. He is also interested in the processes of self-regulation and, specifically, the simultaneous pursuit of multiple goals. He has been a visiting professor at HEC Graduate School of Management in Paris, at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and at the business schools of Stanford University and New York University. He has written more than 30 articles and serves on the editorial boards of leading marketing journals, such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Marketing Science.

Norbert Schwarz (http://sitemaker.umich.edu/norbert.schwarz) is Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, and Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. His research interests focus on human judgment, including the interplay of feeling and thinking, the role of conversational processes, and the psychology of self-reports. Before joining the University of Michigan, he taught psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and served as Scientific Director of ZUMA, an interdisciplinary social science research center. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and a recipient of the Wilhelm Wundt Medal of the German Psychological Association.

Itamar Simonson is Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Itamar has published more than 50 articles in leading marketing and decision-making journals, primarily in the areas of buyer decision making, consumer choice, and marketing management. He has won many awards for his research, including the best article published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research O'Dell Award (two times), the best article in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, the Association for Consumer Research Ferber Award, and the American Marketing Association award for the best article on services marketing. At Stanford, Dr. Simonson has taught MBA courses on marketing management, marketing to businesses, and technology marketing and doctoral courses on buyer behavior, buyer research methods, and decision making. Itamar serves on the eight editorial boards of leading marketing and decision-making journals.