How Does The Choice Set Size Affect The Choice Satisfaction?

With the progress and development of society and technology,market competition has become more intense.As a result,enterprises provide more and more products or services continuously to improve their competitiveness in the market.Traditional economic and psychological theories suggested that having more options is beneficial to decision makers,since that their needs and preferences are more likely to be satisfied.However,some recent researches have proved that too many options,in some cases,will lead to negative experiences and outcomes,such as more regret,lower satisfaction and lower self-confidence in decision-making,this phenomenon is referenced as "choice overload effect"(COE).Most of the existing researches explore the influencing factors of the choice overload effect from the characteristics of the choice set and the decision-making context.There are relatively few researches study COE based on the theory of individual regulation mode,which is extracted from individual factors of the decision makers.To this end,from the perspective of individual trait self-regulation mode,we explore the boundary effect of COE and the difference of psychological mechanism of consumer experiencing choice overload effect between two type regulation mode.We applied choice satisfaction to measure the choice overload effect and analyzed the influence condition and mechanism of choice set size on decision satisfaction by means of psychological experiment.For this purpose,two experiments are conducted and the data are processed by independent sample T-test,one-way variance analysis and regression analysis in SPSS20.0.We verified the effect of the choice set size on the satisfaction and the moderating effect of regulation mode,as well as the complete mediating effect of cognitive difficulty in the mentioned process.To be specific,the main findings are that:(1)Choice set size can do affect the choice satisfaction of the consumer,there is lower choice satisfaction in the larger choice set than that in small choice set,i.e.,consumers are more likely to experience choice overload effect in large choice set;(2)There are significant differences in the influence of choice set size on choice satisfaction under the two different dimensions of regulatory mode.On the one hand,the satisfaction of assessors in large choice set is significantly lower than that in small choice set,however locomotors have no difference in choice satisfaction when facing different choice set sizes;On the other hand,there exists significant lower choice satisfaction of assessors than that of locomotors in large choice set,but no significant difference in small choice sets;(3)Cognitive difficulty will mediate the moderation of regulation mode on the relationship between choice set size and choice satisfaction.Concretely,regulatory mode can moderate the influence of choice set size on choice satisfaction by completely adjusting the influence of selection set size on cognitive difficulty.We identified the effect of regulation mode on choice overload effect and the specific psychological mechanism in the process mentioned above,which has positive theoretical and practical significance.This paper not only enriches the research on the boundary influencing factors and psychological mechanism of choice overload effect,but also provides theoretical support for enterprises to use effective marketing communication means to stimulate consumers' situational assessment mode or locomotion mode,and then to set the quantity of choice set according to its characteristics and subsequent product marketing activities.