THE EFFECT OF DECISION STRATEGY ON DECIDING TO DEFER CHOICE

Recent research has examined consumer decision making when the option of not choosing any of the alternatives is also provided. The findings from this research suggest that the decision to defer choice is sensi tive to the uncertainty of choosing the most preferred option from the set of alternatives provided. Building on this research, the author t ests whether the decision to defer choice is also influenced by task v ariables that influence decision uncertainty. In the first experiment, this proposition is tested for choice problems in which information o n three relatively equally attractive alternatives is presented either sequentially or simultaneously. As predicted, the preference for the defer-choice option was greater when the three alternatives were prese nted simultaneously. A second study forced subjects into using one of four decision strategies in order to choose between two nondominated a lternatives. The preference for the no-choice option was found to be h igher when the rule required explicit attribute tradeoffs and lower wh en it simplified choice. These results suggest that choice uncertainty is influenced by the decision strategy used to determine the preferen ce among alternatives. We conclude with a discussion of the implicatio ns of the results for marketers' communication strategies.