Effect Of Website Information Context On Consumers’ Decision-Makiing Process

Information providing has always been an important issue in both marketing practice and research field. Many studies found that when information amount exceeds the limit of consumers’ capacity, it will lead to worse decision quality and experience, result in "Information Overload" phenomenon.In online environment, due to the unlimited shelf space, retailers can provide abundant products and mass product information to consumers. While reducing consumers’ information searching cost, it also makes Information Overload phenomenon more serious. However,with the help of Internet technology, shopping website can provide decision aid tools to facilitate the integration and processing of information. Website can also provide products’ sales volume, user ratings, recommendations and other extrinsic cues, to help consumers making purchase decision. Information load, decision aid tools and products’ extrinsic cues make online shopping environment different from traditional shopping environment. It is meaningful to study how consumers make their decisions under such a new information context.Most previous studies focus only on the impact of these factors on comsumers’ decision outcomes, only few studies concern the mechanism of this influence. It is still unknown that how "information overload" leads to consumers’ decision quality decline, how decision aid tools and recommendations signal change consumers’ decision-making process, thus resulting into decision outcome differences.According to Cost-Benefit theory from bounded rationality, processing information produce cognitive cost.Because consumers pursue both saving cognitive effort and improving decision quality, they will choose decision strategies that balance information-processing cost and decision quality. When information context changes, consumers’ decision-making strategies change accordingly, resulting in different decision outcomes. By implementing a2(information overload:low VS high)*2decision support tools(yes VS no)*recommendation signals(yes VS no) between group experimental design, investigating subjects’consideration Set and Choice Set,this paper explores how information context affect consumers’ decision-making process.Experimental result shows that subjects in high information load group have larger and more homogeneous Consideration Set and Choice Set. Besides, more recommended product included in their sets. When provided with decision aid tools, subjects’ Choice set size become smaller, with smaller proportion of familiar brand’ products; Recommendation signal do not affect subjects’ Consideration Set size and Choice Set size, but it reduced subject’s decision time.This paper draws some conclusions:first, when information load increases, information-processing cost increases, consumers shift to more cost-saving heuristic decision strategy, relying more heavily on heuristic cues.Second, both decision aid tools and recommendation signals help consumers make decisions. However, they work in different ways:the former reduces information processing cost, making consumers pay more cognitive effort to deal with product information, while recommendation signals work as heuristic clues, simplifying product evaluation and product selection.This paper makes several contributions. First, it explore consumers’ decision-making process, using the Cost-Benefit theory to explain the phenomenon of in formation overload; Secondly, It helps to understand how consumers adjust their decision-making strategies in different information context, how decision aid tools and peripheral cues help consumers to make decision. Third, by investigating composition of consumer’s consideration set and choice set, this study helps to know what kind of products have easier access to consumer’s choice set, this insight can guide online retailers and producers in marketing strategies developing.