What Is The Choice Overload Problem?

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It is not a common everyday question you ask yourself but do you know how many choices you have to make in an average day? Every second of everyday we are choosing, and there are always alternatives. We do not take note of the choices we make, it almost just comes as common nature but the number is much higher than we all may think. One of the biggest modern day choosing problems that we face is the choice overload problem. Troffer (1971) says “Overchoice takes place when the advantages of diversity and individualization are canceled by the complexity of buyer 's decision-making process.” It is a cognitive process where people find making a decision very difficult as they are faced with many options. Choice overload occurs when various …show more content…

Whereas on the other hand, the more choices available, the more likely people are to put all their money in pure money market accounts. There are negative consequences to offering people more and more choices. People are more likely to delay choosing -- procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest.This in turn means they are more likely to make worse choices including financial and medical choices. They choose things that make them less satisfied, even when they do objectively better. (Iyengar, 2012) There are however some potential solutions to choice overload and in particular four techniques for mitigating the problem. All these techniques have sufficient empirical research and can easily be applied to any business and management working environment. The first technique is simply to ‘cut’ which simplistically explains the term that less is more. It is better to cut out certain options to be left with less choices to make your decision easier. If you are willing to cut and get rid of extraneous redundant options then there will be an increase in sales, lowering in costs which then improves the choosing …show more content…

An everyday example to explain this would be why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use a credit card as opposed to cash? This is because it doesn 't feel like real money and consequently making it feel more concrete can actually be a positive and it can help people to save more. This brings us on to the third technique which is categorisation. This relates to choice overload as it suggests that we can handle more categories than we can handle choices.These categories should say something to the chooser and not the choice-maker. Furthermore the fourth and final technique is the condition for complexity. This explains that we can actually handle a lot more information than we may think we can. We have to gradually increase the complexity of information and make it easier for ourselves (Iyengar,

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