Screening From Large Assortments: the Use of Include and Exclude Strategies in Consideration Set Construction

When narrowing down an option set, decision makers use two strategies: include and exclude. Two experiments show that consumers are more likely to use an include strategy when faced with a large compared to a small assortment. This preference for an include strategy is due to the decrease in relative effort required by an include strategy as the number of options increases. The results suggest that larger assortments, and the use of an include strategy, have implications on decision difficulty, anticipated regret, consideration set size, the weighting of attributes, and the number, valence, and focus of consumers’ thought processes.

Citation:

Joseph K. Goodman and Susan Broniarczyk (2009) ,"Screening From Large Assortments: the Use of Include and Exclude Strategies in Consideration Set Construction", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36, eds. Ann L. McGill and Sharon Shavitt, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 214-217.