Consumer Decision Making in Online Shopping Environments: The Effects of Interactive Decision Aids

• Published in: Marketing science (Providence, R.I.) R.I.), 2000, Vol.19 (1), p.4-21
• Main Authors: Haubl, Gerald, Trifts, Valerie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Brands; Conceptualization; Consideration Sets; Consumer Behavior; Consumer choice; Consumers; Decision Aids; Decision Making; Decision support systems; Effects; Electronic Commerce; Hypotheses; Information Processing; Information Search; Interactive computer systems; Marketing; Marketing research; Online services; Online Shopping; Product information; Recommendation Agents; Recommendations; Shopping; Statistical analysis; Studies; World Wide Web
• ISSN: 0732-2399; 1526-548X
• DOI: 10.1287/mksc.19.1.4.15178

Despite the explosive growth of electronic commerce and the rapidly increasing number of consumers who use interactive media (such as the World Wide Web) for prepurchase information search and online shopping, very little is known about how consumers make purchase decisions in such settings. A unique characteristic of online shopping environments is that they allow vendors to create retail interfaces with highly interactive features. One desirable form of interactivity from a consumer perspective is the implementation of sophisticated tools to assist shoppers in their purchase decisions by customizing the electronic shopping environment to their individual preferences. The availability of such tools, which we refer to as interactive decision aids for consumers, may lead to a transformation of the way in which shoppers search for product information and make purchase decisions. The primary objective of this paper is to investigate the nature of the effects that interactive decision aids may have on consumer decision making in online shopping environments. While making purchase decisions, consumers are often unable to evaluate all available alternatives in great depth and, thus, tend to use two-stage processes to reach their decisions. At the first stage, consumers typically screen a large set of available products and identify a subset of the most promising alternatives. Subsequently, they evaluate the latter in more depth, perform relative comparisons across products on important attributes, and make a purchase decision. Given the different tasks to be performed in such a two-stage process, interactive tools that provide support to consumers in the following respects are particularly valuable: (1) the initial screening of available products to determine which ones are worth considering further, and (2) the in-depth comparison of selected products before making the actual purchase decision. This paper examines the effects of two decision aids, each designed to assist consumers in performing one of the above tasks, on purchase decision making in an online store. The first interactive tool, a recommendation agent (RA), allows consumers to more efficiently screen the (potentially very large) set of alternatives available in an online shopping environment. Based on self-explicated information about a consumer's own utility function (attribute importance weights and minimum acceptable attribute levels), the RA generates a personalized list of recommended alterna